What we want and where we are; facts not phrases

WHAT WE WANT

AND

WHERE WE ARE

H'TD

WHAT WE WANT

AND
WHERE WE ARE

W. A. APPLETON

WHAT WE WANT

AND

WHERE WE ARE

FACTS not PHRASES

BY

W. A. APPLETON

SECRETARY OF THE GENERAL FEDERATION
OF TRADE UNIONS

WITH A FOREWORD BY

SAMUEL GOMPERS

PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION
OF LABOR

NEW ^SJT YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, IQ22,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

GEORGE ROBERTS

WHOSE SYMPATHY AND KINDNESS HAVE

SUSTAINED ME DURING TROUBLOUS TIMES

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

FOREWORD

BY SAMUEL GOMPERS

PRESIDENT OF AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

Great Britain has no man better fitted to write
of the achievements and the accomplishments of
British working people than Mr. William A. Apple-
ton. Whether the reader finds it possible to agree
at all times with Mr. Appleton's conclusions is of
less moment than the fact that the reader will surely
find Mr. Appleton's writings facts that are impor-
tant and opinions that are the result of careful
thought and long experience.

My own acquaintance with the author of this book
goes back over a long period of years. As a leading
trade union official in a position which has brought
him in touch not only with the workers of his own
country but with the workers of the world, Mr.
Appleton has lived and served through a period
which forms a large and illuminating background for
his present effort.

He is not one of those who will, to quote his own
language, "reiterate frequently exploded platitudes"
or "rejoice anew over the passing of vain resolu-
tions." Mr. Appleton is essentially and fundamen-
tally a trade unionist. He is thoroughly in accord

viii FOREWORD

with the American trade union movement in his atti-
tude toward the theories, formulas and dogmas of
the politicians. In matters of trade unionism, Mr.
Appleton is probably more nearly American than
any other leading British trade union official. For
that reason his viewpoint and his analysis will be
particularly interesting to Americans. They will be
able to understand him because of this kinship of
mentality.

Entirely aside from the general soundness of his
views and the practical value of his information,
Mr. Appleton has a claim upon Americans for a
sympathetic reading of his book which will be appre-
ciated, at least, among American trade unionists.

During the war he was one of a group, then all
too small, who in England and Continental Europe,
stood against peace by negotiation, but who stood
for the destruction of militarism and autocracy. I
make bold here to record one of the declarations I
made during the war — "I hate war and I would not
want this war to last one hour longer than necessary
to attain democratic objectives and yet I would not
end it one day before those objectives had been per-
manently achieved." Even though Mr. Appleton
may not have used the words I employed, yet I know
that was his position.

He was uncompromising in his opposition to the
Stockholm conference project, the danger of which
at that time was fully appreciated by only a small
group in our own country but the defeat of which
was a mighty factor in the conflict then raging.

FOREWORD dx

Every effort of this character to intrigue the allied
nations found a strong and unfaltering opponent in
Mr. Appleton and those who worked with him.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Appleton will write
more books. His long experience and his deep
understanding should be made available to those
whose opportunities have been fewer but whose
needs are ever present.

SAMUEL GOMPERS.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

To know the nature and extent of desire and the
foundations upon which attempts to attain desire
may be based, should be the aim of all men in all
communities. Failure on the part of the great
majority to analyse desire and circumstances and
possibility, accentuates the outward expressions of
unrest and facilitates the spread of dangerous propa-
ganda. The tendency to generalize, apart from
effective analysis, often involves the endorsement by
the masses of proposals which, in spite of superficial
attractiveness, too frequently tend to exhaust na-
tional strength and national resources.

The demand for maintenance, irrespective of
remunerative return; the proposal for levies which
involved the dissipation of capital and the conse-
quent limitation of industrial enterprises; the de-
mand for legislation which continually increases
bureaucratic control and administrative costs, would
have secured but few supporters had every proposal
been stripped of political bias and subterfuge and
accorded full consideration by a majority of the
people.

Broadly speaking, we all think we know what it
is we want. The term most frequently used to
express the common desire is "better conditions."

xii AUTHOR'S PREFACE

Here we all agree. Everybody desires better con-
ditions. Where we part company is in the matter
of definition and method.

Obviously, it is not sufficient to know only what
we want. To achieve real success we must also know
where we are in respect of bases and possibility.
Desire that is unattainable should be eliminated if
mental and moral health is to be maintained. The
acceptance of this conclusion has led me at all times
to apply the interrogative method to the problems
arising out of my work and my associations with
men. It has been my practice to reduce to writing
my questions, addressed to myself, and to answer
them in the light of what knowledge I possessed of
history and natural law.

The most convenient form of presenting these
analyses of the problems which faced me and which
affected the lives of all with whom I directly or indi-
rectly came in contact, and which affected also the
stability of the State, appeared to be that of a book
containing a series of chapters, each dealing with
one topic and each aiming at the exposure of fallacy
and the elucidation of fact. The success of the effort
will be determined by the extent to which readers of
the chapters are assisted in deciding within their
own minds what they really do desire and whether
the attainment of these desires is possible through
efforts, or at prices which the individual or the com-
munity is willing to make or pay.

The mechanical work connected with the prepara-
tion of any book involves both time and anxiety.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE xiii

Most of this mechanical work has been taken off my
hands, and I desire to express sincerest thanks to
Dorothy Golding for relieving me of tasks that
would have taken more time than it would have been
possible for me to give.

W. A. APPLETON,
June, 1921.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

There is no man in the great Trade Union move-
ment better equipped for the role of adviser than
Mr. W. A. Appleton. For many years he has been
at the head of one of the largest combinations of
labour in the world and has had unique opportuni-
ties to view Trade Union conditions in almost every
part of the globe. It is therefore as much a per-
formance of a public duty as a private inclination
that he enters the field of literature to either admon-
ish or instruct the people to whom he belongs.

In times of stress we are apt to do strange things,
and adopt stranger remedies in the sometimes vain
hope of overcoming our difficulties. The Trade
Union movement has had its period of stress and
strange remedies, but its recent afflictions have pro-
duced a finer crop of quacks than usual, and it is the
more necessary that this great instrument for human
betterment and industrial regeneration should begin
to consult the less showy but more sober of its
professors.

Most people will only read those things which
please; there are, however, a fair number left who
prefer truth and facts to any number of pleasant,
attractive theories. This book is written primarily
for the latter, but even the former will find it to
their advantage to read it, not once, but twice.

xvi INTRODUCTORY NOTE

We may not agree with all the conclusions with
entire accord, but a perusal will do a great deal to
strengthen the faith of those who believe that if it
can be kept on straight and sensible lines, the Trade
Union movement cannot be diminished by any tem-
porary reverses such as have been recently inflicted
upon it.

JOHN WARD

,(Li>CoL.), C.B., C.M.G., J.P., M.P.
HETMAN, DON COSSACKS.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I PAGE

PHRASES 19

CHAPTER II
THE RELATIONS OF LABOUR AND CAPITAL 27

CHAPTER III
TRADE UNIONISM 44

CHAPTER IV
PERTINENT INTERROGATIONS : 57

CHAPTER V
UNEMPLOYMENT: CAUSES AND REMEDIES 68

CHAPTER VI
LABOUR UNREST 87

CHAPTER VII
STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES 99

CHAPTER VIII
WAGES AND METHODS 113

CHAPTER IX
HOUSING 121

CHAPTER X
EDUCATION 129

CHAPTER XI
WAR AND ARMIES 139

CHAPTER XII
THE SOLDIER AND LABOUR 147

xviii CONTENTS

CHAPTER XIII FAGB

SYNDICALISM . • 157

CHAPTER XIV
COMMUNISM IN RUSSIA AND BRITAIN • 165

CHAPTER XV
CO-PARTNERSHIP 174

CHAPTER XVI
TRADE AND TAXES . . . .. • • • A A A -• - l85

WHAT WE WANT

AND
WHERE WE ARE

WHAT WE WANT
AND WHERE WE ARE

CHAPTER I
PHRASES

THE effect of phrases upon British mentality
undoubtedly adds point to the query of those
foreigners who ask whether Britons ever think, and
if so, whether they ever carry their thoughts to
logical conclusions.

Some years ago a great political party came into
power on the "three acres and a cow" cry. A little
later, because we were told that our beer would cost
us more, another political party was driven out of
power. During the last few years, and especially
during and immediately after the war, Britain has
suffered, and continues to suffer, through the national
tendency to accept the phrase and to follow the
phrase-maker irrespective of logic or physical possi-
bility. We might perhaps despair if our American
friends did not demonstrate their kinship by imi-
tating that fashion in faith which obsesses us. It is
comforting to realise that others besides the British

19

20 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

surrender to the glamour of the epigram or the
neatly turned phrase.

President Wilson's fourteen points were seized
upon with avidity. They crystallised the subcon-
scious, and often disconnected, meanderings of men's
minds, and at once removed, or at least greatly
reduced, the necessity for independent and definite
thinking.

"Secret diplomacy" and "self-determination"
fastened, limpet-like, upon the public imagination.
Some of the greatest adepts at secret diplomacy,
men who practise it daily, men who rejoice in the
power that it gives them, at once began to declaim
against it; sometimes because they honestly desired
to get rid of it, but mostly because they realised that
declaiming against it distracted observation and left
them freer to pursue it. Very few of the general
public stopped to ask whether it was possible, or
even desirable, to manipulate affairs of State, mat-
ters of international relationship, programmes of
trade unions and other equally delicate operations,
in the light of the publicity accorded by modern
journalism. It was hastily assumed that secret
diplomacy was the cause of the war I — abolish secret
diplomacy, and, as a matter of course, war might be
expected to be abolished also.

The wise man, who is not so easily swayed by
every wind that blows across Areopagus or Rich-
mond Hill, might shake his head and still cling to
the idea of the quiet and tentative approach when
complicated policies had to be discussed, but his

PHRASES 81

wisdom was discredited. The masses were for Mr.
Wilson's way. There was to be no more secret
diplomacy, and even the transactions of the Supreme
Council, sitting in inquest upon the world's affairs,
were to be published, and an era of frank truth was
to be inaugurated. To-day the wise men do not
shake their heads. They only smile cynically.

"Self-determination" was seriously discussed, not
merely as a new conception, but almost as a divinely
inspired one. The phrase was grandiloquently dis-
cussed and supported from a thousand platforms,
and the vision of each man and each group, each
nation and each continent, deciding, without let or
restraint, his or its future, grew until, to some men,
it appeared like a shining reality.

Again, the wise men doubted and wondered
whether it would be possible for every man's rights,
or every nation's rights, to be governed by the man
himself or by the nation. They saw the existence of
conflicting rights, and realised that these could not
be determined by the individual or the nation, but
must be regulated by the consent that follows upon
good will, and by the circumstances which affect peo-
ples and nations and times.

It was said that the whole Peace Treaty would
be based upon this principle of self-determination.
It is doubtful whether any man who was closely con-
cerned with the determining or drafting of the Peace
Treaty believed in his heart then, or will even argue
to-day, that the principle of self-determination was,
or could be, undeviatingly adhered to.

22 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Once up against the facts, the wit of the best and
the cleverest failed to produce any formula that
would give effect to the declarations. There has
not been self-determination. It is doubtful even
whether there has been a reasonably strict adher-
ence to the principle of right. As in the past, so now
and always, might has been used to interpret right,
and, as a consequence, there are Germans, millions
of them, handed over to Czecho-Slovakia, and there
are Hungarians, over a million of them, handed over
to Rumania; and there are Austrians and Slavs
handed over to Italy. The attempts to determine
ethnologically instead of economically, have already
disturbed industrial conditions in many countries and
have involved many peoples in needless suffering.

Perhaps all these things were inevitable, but, if
they were so, it discredits the phrasemonger, and
illuminates the folly of those who permit themselves
to be governed by phrases.

Nothing, indeed, can have been more embarrass-
ing to some political groups than the formulae
adopted in the early days of the war. The anxiety
to discover partisan battle-cries led them into diffi-
culties which they cannot easily overcome.

There was the phrase, "freedom of the seas."
The seas were free to every nation in the days that
preceded the war. The ports of Britain were open
to the ships from every country. The ports of
every country were only open on terms to the mer-
chandise of Britain. If those who raise the cry of
"freedom of the seas" mean that they are prepared

PHRASES 23

to fight all those nations that close their ports against
Great Britain, they are likely to have a busy time.

Unfortunately, freedom of the seas was differ-
ently interpreted by German statesmen, for, speak-
ing in New York in 1915, Herr Dernberg declared
that by freedom of the seas he meant that "there
should be no hostile operations outside the three-
mile limit." This would have been magnificent for
Germany, for she would have been able to dispose
troops anywhere within the radii of the Central
Empires, while Britain herself would not have been
able to move troops for the assistance of Belgium
or France, or even to take them to her own colonies,
without offering the British friends of Germany
opportunities for hostile criticism and condemnation.

Had Britain been pledged to this kind of freedom
in 1914 she would to-day be enduring the humiliation
and horror of military defeat by Germany.

"No annexations, and no indemnities," has formed
the basis of many speeches on political platforms,
but what on earth does it really mean? Is it retro-
spective, present or prospective? Does it apply
to Alsace-Lorraine, or to Bosnia or Herzegovina?
Does it mean, in fact, what it states? If it does,
Germany might be called upon to disgorge what
she has filched in the way of indemnities from Bel-
gium, from Serbia, from Russia, from Rumania, and
from every territory she has invaded. It would
mean also that she gave up all territory to which she
has made claim since 1866, and over which she
sought to exercise political and economic power.

24 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Did the formulists mean that Germany was to
disgorge and repay? If she failed to do this, did
they intend to fight, or would they have been con-
tent with drafting an expostulatory resolution and
sending this round to the communist branches for
adoption?

By war, and by the threat of war, Germany
defeated and plundered Austria in 1866 and France
in 1870, and Denmark in 1884, when she took
Schleswig-Holstein and gave herself the opportunity
to construct the Kiel Canal. In 1897, by threat of
war, she compelled Japan to give up the things
Japan had secured for herself as the result of mili-
tary enterprises against China.

Later on, similar threats compelled France to get
rid of a popular and able Foreign Minister —
Monsieur Delcasse. The history of Prussia has
been an interesting record of war and plunder, and
it is inconceivable that she should relinquish either
cash or territory except under military compulsion.
Germany believed in the survival of the fittest; she
believed that the fittest were the fighters. She also
believed that the end justified the means, and a
peace which might have left her in possession of the
territories or the money, or the property, or the
advantages she temporarily secured as the result of
this war, would have been a victory for her and an
encouragement to further aggression.

Our phrasemongers have yet to learn that war
is a gamble in which the loser pays. Germany has
been a confirmed and ruthless military malefactor.

PHRASES 25

The world, for humanity's sake, had to impose
deterrent penalties. Unless Germany was made to
understand that war did not necessarily pay, trouble
was certain to arise the moment her man-power
and her resources were restored to the position in
which she would consider she had again a fighting
chance. "No annexations and no indemnities"
meant the shortest road to this — for Germany —
desirable position.

In Britain we were told that there was to be a
"new heaven and a new earth." With the Briton's
capacity for generalisation we naturally came to the
conclusion that Britain was to be the premier and
outstanding example of what a new heaven and a
new earth ought to be. Perhaps, of all the phrases,
none sank so deeply into the hearts of the British
as this one. To start with, there are many of us who
believe that already Britain is the best and the most
beautiful of all lands; that its men are the most
honest and the most enterprising; that its women
are the most beautiful and the most faithful. We
are, consequently, predisposed to accept any theory
or any contention which places upon our shoulders
and within our capacity, the duty of introducing the
millennium.

Unhappily, those who promised so much gave
colour to the assumption that all could be achieved
by legislative action, and they have kept Parliament
wandering through a maze of measures, all aiming
at the ideal, but all falling short because men and

26 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

women failed to understand that the ideal must be
based upon the practical.

It was too much to expect that every man and
woman throughout the United Kingdom would sit
down seriously and carry their exploration of these
euphonious phrases to their logical conclusions. It is
not too much to expect, however, that the men who
sit in Parliament, together with the men who claim
to lead communal thought, should themselves essay
this task; and, after careful analysis and comparison
with historic similarities, truthfully and honestly set
forth their conclusions concerning rights and duties
and possibilities.

Not until men get away from the folly of deter-
mining their conduct by phrases; not until they are
willing to search for the truth as it concerns them-
selves and their surroundings, will there be any
possibility of effectively administering the affairs of
mankind or of securing even an approximation to
that new heaven and that new earth which have been
so eloquently pictured and which are so ardently
desired.

CHAPTER II
THE RELATIONS OF LABOUR AND CAPITAL

NO student of human affairs can regard with
equanimity the existing trouble between Capi-
tal and Labour; nor can any student, bearing all the
facts in mind, regard the present attitude of the
worker without some measure of understanding and
sympathy.

For centuries the owners of capital have, un-
consciously and consciously, acted upon the tenets
of what is known as the Manchester school of
economics. They have applied these tenets to the
human as well as to the material factors in industry,
and they can hardly complain if the human, given
only a limited measure of enlightenment, applies in
unlimited fashion the tenets of an economic school
which is diametrically opposed to the Manchester
one.

By treating the human factor as they treated the
material one — by buying labour in the cheapest
market and selling the produce of that labour in the
dearest market, and afterwards pocketing the whole
of the profit — the owners of capital bred in the
workers an atmosphere of serious hostility to present
forms of industry. This hostility is accentuated by
the belief that the owners of capital frequently de-

27

28 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

preciate the market that supplies human effort, in the
same way that they depreciate the market which
supplies other commodities. However untrue it may
be of modern conditions, and especially post-war
conditions, this feeling is finding stronger expression
to-day than in other periods of industrial existence
of which men have ready cognisance.

In Britain, for a hundred years, every effort the
workman made to improve his conditions, his work-
ing hours, his wages, or the social conditions under
which he lived, was scouted, ridiculed, or savagely
repressed. His present resentment is intensified by
the fact that to-day even the capitalist admits that
the desire of the workman for better wages and
conditions was right. The labour politician has
taught the workman to meet this admission by the
historical fact that the capitalist has called to his
aid political resources and national resources in the
shape of the police and military, in order to prevent
the workmen from obtaining better conditions.

In dealing with the modern relations of labour
to the owners of capital, we have to remember, in
explanation of some facts and in partial extenuation
of others, that the owner of capital has mismanip-
ulated the lives of the workers until their hearts have
become ready receptacles for the dogma of the
doctrinaire and the extremist. It is difficult for those
who have never passed through the fires to realise
the agony the fires inflict. The men or women whose
lives have always fallen in pleasant places can hardly
hope to understand the point of view of the men or

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 29

women whose lives, from birth to death, epitomised
tragedy. The lack of opportunity for the poor
begins before birth, and continues in most cases
until death. The expectant mother knows that her
child will lack some physical or mental quality be-
cause she has worked too much and eaten too little
prior to the child's arrival, while the elderly man
knows that the only way out for him is through the
Valley of the Shadow.

Lancashire of to-day suffers from the inhumanities
perpetrated upon the little children of yesterday;
not by the mothers and fathers, but by the owners
of capital who insisted that very young child labour
was essential to industrial success.

Just before the war, when the Ulster weavers
applied for an increase in wages, one of them de-
clared that he had had eight children, six of whom
had died because he had been unable, though fully
employed, to provide them with the food necessary
to maintain life. To the workman the causes of
these things are obscure, but the fact of them is more
certain than that Christ died.

In Berlin, in June, 1914, a German socialist, ex-
tremely clever, high up in the councils of his party,
and with an international experience, told me that
if I could live and see Germany after seven genera-
tions of industrialism, I should discover nothing like
the physical and mental deterioration that to-day
affects some of the industrial centres of Great
Britain. "I am satisfied," he said, "that apart from
what Social Democracy in Germany may do, the

30 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

German Government itself will set a higher value
upon flesh and blood and mind than you appear to
have set in Britain." These words were bitter; the
more bitter because I felt that in the main they were
justified.

I have known workmen penalised by boycott for
six months at a stretch, whose only crime was
reckoning up the piecework prices of men who were
themselves incapable of working out the figures.
Even within the last fifteen years innumerable dis-
putes have arisen in consequence of the attitude that
the owner of capital, as represented by the employer,
has taken towards the worker and the organisations
which he has built up. Half the industrial disputes
that took place before the war arose from the
employers' stupid and short-sighted refusal to dis-
cuss questions affecting wages and conditions of
employment with the duly accredited representatives
of the Trade Unions. It was part of the employers'
considered policy to undermine the influence of these
men, to misrepresent their actions,and to encourage
rebellion against them in the Unions which they
represented.

Those who sow the wind must expect to reap the
whirlwind.

These references to conditions, it will be said, are
commonplaces, and are not true of the present day.
Possibly they are less true, but the suspicion they en-
gendered is profoundly influencing Labour thoughts
and attitudes. That is why the commonplaces are
stated so fully.

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 31

They show that the hostility of the workman has
some justification, and emphasise the difficulties of
removing the suspicion with which he regards the
present attitude of even the best of employers. He
realises that the war has broken down many barriers ;
that a common intercourse with danger and death
has stripped employers and workmen of many mis-
conceptions, and has brought the manhood of each
into closer communion. He fears, however, that as
the cause of the change becomes obscured by the
passing of time, so the effect will diminish, and that
attempts will more and more be made to reimpose
the old irresponsible relationships.

If one says that the cost of the change has been
too tremendous for the effect to easily diminish, the
workman asks questions which are barbed with the
experiences of the past. Centuries have been oc-
cupied in breeding the distrust which exists, and only
a gigantic effort on the part of the employer and on
the part of that other class which neither employs
nor is employed in the ordinary acceptance of the
term, can convince the worker that the change of
heart is real and permanent, and that, henceforth,
there shall be at least genuine attempts to give to
each man and to each woman his or her honest dues.
The new spirit which such a conviction would beget
would be favourable to a common-sense and gradual
development of all the relations existing between
capital and labour.

A new spirit is necessary, for, while the owner of
capital is still attached to the spirit of the Manches-

32 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

ter school, Labour has, rather blindly and without
analysis, accepted many of the ideas of Karl Marx,
as interpreted by his latter-day adherents. The
employer has translated capital into terms of land,
buildings, machinery and cash. The workman has
accepted the employer's translation, with the qualifi-
cation that, as all these things represented natural
resources upon which Labour had operated, they
belonged to Labour in the mass rather than to the
few people who had successfully appropriated them.

To one who studies rather than dogmatises, both
sides appear to have missed something; because
neither side seems to have considered mental or
spiritual values.

It is possible to have a superabundance of national
resources and of labour, as in Russia, and to exploit
them badly, or not to exploit them at all. Land and
labour — to use familiar terms and to interpret them
in the familiar sense — must be of indifferent value,
apart from intelligent direction and co-ordination.
If both sides could realise that success in industrial
operations depended upon the combination of
materials, mentalities and muscle, it would be
possible to approach the future with greater degrees
of confidence.

In what form will the new spirit, when it arrives,
manifest itself, and what are the dangers which have
to be met pending its coming?

At the moment there are many groups of re-
formers, and each advocates its own panacea. One
would place industry and commerce under the control

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 33

of Trade Guilds; another proposes to institute a
system of direct management of industry and com-
merce by the workers engaged in the workshops;
another would place all these matters in the hands
of the State; a fourth aims only at anarchy, because
it believes that chaos must inevitably precede order,
and that the greater the chaos the more perfect the
resultant system will be. A fifth would leave matters
in principle as at present, but would insist upon the
common observance of what may be termed the
social and industrial humanities.

Of those who advocate the claims of Trade
Guilds, it may be said that they build upon a dis-
credited foundation. The Trade Guild has already
had its day. It died of super-exclusiveness, and its
prototype can hardly escape a similar disease. As
it is the landless man who attacks most virulently
landowners and landownership, so it was the ex-
cluded craftsman who attacked and encompassed the
downfall of the old Trade Guilds. Unless the advo-
cates of resuscitation can show that the modern
form of the Guild will include everyone engaged in,
or attached to, the occupation, history will repeat
itself.

What is known as workshop control has many
advocates, but a departure on these lines can hardly
be regarded as a course likely to secure the best
results. This demand is of political rather than
industrial origin. It involves the immediate and
non-compensatory appropriation of wealth and
capital. It assumes a knowledge, not merely of

34 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

industrial processes, but of commercial enterprise
and international exchanges.

I have met some workmen who hold these views.
They are admirable workmen. They are intelligent,
and some of them possess extensive knowledge ; but
I cannot say that I know any advocate of this
system who is at once an admirable workman, an
intelligent person, and the possessor of an effective
knowledge or understanding of the international
character of trade and who possesses also that ex-
perience which is necessary to make international
trade a success. Much of the trouble of those
who advocate this form of control arises from the
mistaken notion that trade is mainly an internal and
national matter; when, as a matter of fact, much of
the wealth that Britain enjoys, and much of the
capital she has stored up, has been derived from
commerce and overseas trade. Into some of this
trade no British-made goods ever entered.

Some of the men I know are intelligent enough,
given time, to deal with these problems in a satisfac-
tory manner; but events move very rapidly in these
days, and the country which scraps the methods
evolved from a thousand years of thinking and
striving, and elects to depend upon untried processes
and inexperienced men, will incur very dangerous
risks.

Perhaps I fear the State more than I fear the
inexperienced workman. The latter would suffer as
a consequence of failure, and might be expected to
learn by experience. The State would also suffer by

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 35

failure, but the individuals responsible for failure
would mostly escape suffering, continue to draw
salaries and to qualify for pensions.

It was Mr. Gladstone who declared that it was
the State's business to govern and not to trade. State
interference involves political, as well as industrial,
disadvantage. It is not merely that State trading
costs more in cash; in practice it jeopardises more
than it costs commercially.

The industrial past has had many unhappy phases.
There have been bitter conflicts between Capital and
Labour, but in Britain until recently there have been
no revolutionary collisions between Labour and the
State. If the State extends its activities, and does
more than provide opportunities and hold an even
balance as between the workers and the owners of
capital, it increases its disagreements with both, so
that, instead of strikes, it will become necessary for
it to face the possibility, and perhaps the fact, of
revolution.

Those who glibly advocate State control of enter-
prise should ponder this fact. Workmen are being
generally advised to commit the mistake of assuming
that what the State has done in abnormal circum-
stances, and on credit, the State can do in normal
circumstances when credit has to be liquidated by
cash or goods.

It is astonishing to find how few people there are
who realise that what the State was doing during
the war was merely to purchase, within its own bor-
ders, articles that had no reproductive value what-

36 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

ever, and for which it paid a price altogether dis-
proportionate to the work value involved. In other
words, the State was purchasing fireworks and pay-
ing for them with paper — paper which had no value
outside Britain unless it was backed by that very
capital which the syndicalist now seeks to dissipate.
War-time prosperity was indeed fictitious, but the
average man and woman did not realise this, and so
was started a chain of ideas concerning post-war
possibilities that well might, through undue inter-
ference by the State, ultimately result in revolution
and the disintegration of that great Commonwealth
which includes, with Britain, Australia, Canada,
South Africa and India, and a host of kindred com-
munities.

Only the fool desires to produce chaos in the hope
that order will involve. Anarchy — the elimination
of law and order and restraint — whether in industry
or in politics, or in commerce, carries with it dis-
aster. All nature bows to law and cries out against
its infraction. Anarchy may be dismissed as a rever-
sion to the ineffective elemental and as the least use-
ful of all the theories advanced by the advocates of
revolutionary change.

The case against revolution is admirably epito-
mised in the words of the Management Committee
of the General Federation of Trade Unions.

"It is notorious," says the Committee, all repre-
sentative Trade Unionists, "that some men live only
to fan the flame of discontent. They have no scru-
ples. They call themselves revolutionaries, and the

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 37

best of them frankly aim at the creation of a social
state which has ceased to know either inequalities or
pain. Their mental outlook prevents them seeing
that disastrous results may follow beneficent inten-
tions if these intentions ignore economic laws and
social rights."

It is argued that revolutions are necessary to
coerce and displace governments. Unfortunately,
revolutionary action cannot be confined to the pun-
ishment of governments. It is the people who give
blood and suffer material loss; and whatever is lost,
the people must replace by renewed and greater
industrial effort. In an Empire constituted as is the
British Empire, that replacement must be tremen-
dous, for the trouble cannot be confined to geo-
graphical or ethnological limits.

Prior to the war there were already in existence
groups which aimed at a transformation of the social
and industrial order. In the main, these groups
sought to move by evolutionary and constitutional
means, and they have undoubtedly done much to
awaken the social conscience. After the war other
bodies sprang into prominence, and by the specious-
ness of their early appeals secured the support of
the less thoughtful. It soon became evident that
the object of these associations was to assist.the alien
and the enemy rather than to help their own nation,
or even to do their best for democracy.

These associations included ill-educated workers,
disappointed politicians, men and women of gener-
ous sympathies and comfortable fortunes, and dilet-

38 WHAT WE WANT 'AND WHERE WE ARE

tanti from the universities. They derived whatever
motive power they possessed from men narrow in
their outlook, honest perhaps in their convictions,
but not always happy in their methods. They were
helped by the vacillations and weakness of those who
occupied the seats of the mighty without adequately
filling them.

As the time grew, lack of success led to these very
mixed organisations adopting less and less scrupu-
lous methods, and to-day it is not unfair to say that
they very freely practise the chicanery they them-
selves so eloquently denounce. They reason little
from facts or in the abstract, but concentrate upon
the abuse of the individual.

Even to-day the success of their efforts is very
limited. While men who enjoy piquancy lend an
ear to their utterances, they give small credence to
their arguments. It requires more than declamation
to force off the constitutional path a people whose
genius is of the evolutionary and constructional type.
Lack of initial success has led these revolutionaries
to magnify existing evils and to place every obstacle
in the way of those who seek to relieve existing diffi-
>culties, or who seek to develop understandings be-
tween employers and workmen.

To achieve full success they must prevent any
arrangements which will leave the responsible parties
joint opportunities of attacking the problems that
confront them both. One who is particularly active
in this separatist work once said : "Oh, yes, the aims
of those who seek to promote understandings are

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 39

admirable for existing society, and for this genera-
tion of men; but we seek to revolutionise society, and
are acting for the ultimate, rather than for the
present."

It was impossible to convince this man, as it is
impossible to convince others, that the ultimate
grows out of the present, and that every step which
ameliorates the conditions of to-day improves the
chances of better conditions to-morrow. It is equally
impossible to make such understand that the wisest
of us are incapable of foreshadowing the circum-
stances which will affect the lives of those who live a
hundred years hence, or the remedies that may be
necessary for the social diseases which will exist
amongst our great-grandchildren. "Sufficient unto
the day is the evil thereof" is not one of their
slogans.

The proverb which declares that it is unwise to
change horses when crossing a stream is full of
wisdom that might advisedly be applied at the
present moment. Those who believe this proverb
can, for the moment, discard the panaceas that in-
volve revolutionary changes. It seems preferable
to wrestle with the evils that are, rather than to
take chances with evils that cannot be apprehended
or estimated. It may be that some day the present
social and industrial system will give place to a
better one; but neither evolution nor revolution
suggests a possibility of securing perfection in one
generation. This being the case, it seems both de-
sirable and profitable that we move from existing

40 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

conditions step by step, and with due regard for
these consequences which are possible, though not
now unforeseeable.

It may be desirable to bring about catastrophe
for the sake of propaganda; it may be very altruistic
and very noble to think only of the future genera-
tions, but I cannot escape the conclusion that my own
duty lies with the people who live to-day.

Believing this, it is inevitable that I should look
to the improvement of the present system, rather
than to the institution of some new and untried sys-
tem, for the social improvements and advantages all
decent people believe to be necessary.

The first improvement that one must demand
from the existing system is the greater stabilisation
of employment. The most demoralising and ener-
vating of all fear is that of unemployment and the
miseries that follow. Many men face hardship with
equanimity, but no decent man faces idleness without
terror. It is not merely the reduction of food sup-
plies, the lack of small luxuries, and the growth of
debt; it is the development of the spirit of depend-
ence, and ultimately of the spirit of inefficiency and
ineffectivity. Those who have had opportunities of
watching men through long periods of unemploy-
ment will understand how certainly, and with what
accelerated ratio, moral and physical inefficiency
develops. The man who has been out of work a
week, or even a month, is keen to secure a new berth ;
but with succeeding months his keenness too fre-
quently disappears. Misfortune gave me personal

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 41

opportunities for self-analysis, and my conclusions in
this direction are strengthened by other people's
experiences.

It is not merely in the interests of individuals that
employment should be better stabilised. It is in
the interests of the State, because Labour is, in itself,
Capital, and to waste labour is to waste national
resources. Moral as well as economic considerations
demand that where the conditions of trade are such
that it is impossible to keep staffs fully employed for
the normal day, arrangements should be made,
wherever possible, to reduce the hours of employ-
ment instead of reducing the number of employees.
There should be, trade union regulations notwith-
standing, improved facilities for the interchange of
labour between one industry and another. It is
inevitable, if unpleasant, that reduced production
should involve lower standards of living. Only the
disingenuous politician would dispute a fact so
obvious.

The next thing to demand is a wage that will
represent fair payment for the effort made and a
fair share of the results achieved. The effects
of deviation from fairness, either by employer or
employee, disastrously disturb both relationships and
trade. It is impracticable to lay down a law, univer-
sally applicable, that wages shall always be equal to
food prices. That would be fixing wages without
regard to the value of the article produced. But
wages should be fixed so that, at the worst, they
would afford maintenance, and at other times not

42 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

merely maintenance, but comfort and a promise of
ultimate safety to those who practise thrift. To
secure this, both employer and employed must be
prepared to consider such adjustments of wages,
both up and down, as may be necessary for the ulti-
mate safety and prosperity of industry.

The maximum value can never be obtained from
labour, nor can the maximum benefit accrue to
labour, while there remain any restrictions on the
use of machinery and the exercise of reasonable
effort and intelligence. The advocates of "ca1 canny"
overlook the fact that "ca* canny" increases the cost
of production, and enhances the price to the con-
sumer who, in 95 per cent, of cases, is some fellow-
workman or workwoman. "Ca* canny" is the least
successful way of remedying social and industrial
evils.

Homes, rather than institutes, are needed if life
is to be enjoyed, and if the State is to be an
organisation which men will love and for which
they will fight, capital must concern itself with the
provision of homes. If it does this it will be able
to reduce its contributions to institutions. One tires
of the nostrums offered to mothers, to invalids, to
the broken in the wars, to the feeble in health,
because one knows that most of these would be
unnecessary if the homes of the people were
improved. I shudder when I hear of the efforts
made to establish creches and compare them with
the efforts made to establish homes in which parents
and children might enjoy the richest of pleasures —

LABOUR AND CAPITAL 43

that of each other's company and loving collabora-
tion. I never forget the dictum of the famous sur-
geon who declared that the best hospital was the
home, and the best nurse the wife or mother.

The owners of capital and the workers both
agree, in principle, on all these points. It should
not be too much to ask that they should join in
mutual efforts to put these principles into practice;
and that they should go even further, and set up
mutual arrangements for the discussion of all differ-
ences that arise between them, and for the preven-
tion of strikes about small and unimportant things.

I do not wish to eliminate the right to strike.
That right is a national safeguard, and anyone who
seeks to suppress it is an enemy of the State; but
I do want to see all points of difference discussed
intelligently between the people who are really
concerned; that is, between the employers and the
workmen — the word workmen including, in this
connection, the duly accredited representatives of the
workmen.

It is for this reason that I have always advocated
the provision of voluntary machinery for the dis-
cussion of difficulties and the prevention of disputes.
Sympathy and intelligence can solve most of the
industrial difficulties with which we are beset, pro-
vided these qualities are exercised equally by
employers and Trade Unionists of experience and
responsibility.

CHAPTER III
TRADE UNIONISM

TRADE UNIONISM— the organisation for the
betterment of wages, hours and working con-
ditions, of persons engaged on similar materials,
using similar tools or machines, and producing simi-
lar results or commodities — arose out of the miseries
that men and women endured in the latter part of the
eighteenth and the earlier part of the nineteenth
century. It ceased to be unlawful in 1824, but its
adherents were grievously, and illegally, punished
for a considerable time after this date. Usually, as
was the case with the labourers of Tolpuddle in
Dorsetshire, old Statutes were resuscitated and
desperately strained in order to prevent the growth
of a movement which was regarded with the gravest
apprehension both by employers and politicians.
Savage indeed were some of the sentences passed
upon men whose only offence was trying to secure
such wages as would meet the primitive needs of
the times. The sentence of seven years penal servi-
tude passed upon the Dorsetshire labourers, a
sentence which was publicly approved by Lord
Melbourne, instead of destroying the movement
advertised it, and laid the foundations for Trade
Unionism as it was known twenty years ago.

44

TRADE UNIONISM 45

This movement was in no sense revolutionary.
None of the organisations then created denied the
rights of property, neither did they assail the con-
stitution, nor belittle their own country. Most of
the leaders in those days were men of strong per-
sonality and great courage. They also understood
the delicacy of the industrial machine, and they fully
appreciated the folly of destroying confidence and
balance. Critics have said of them that sometimes
they were more than patient, and that they too often
permitted the continuance of conditions which were
inimical to the workers, and which ought to have
been swept out of existence. In judging them, it is
necessary always to remember their numerical weak-
ness, the strength opposed to them, and to remember
also that they were far more concerned with the ulti-
mate benefit of the industry they were engaged in
than are the men of to-day, who only see industry
through political spectacles.

In the old days, there was little love of the strike
for the strike's own sake; the existing forms of the
lightning strike and the synchronised strike were
unknown. If they had been proposed, they would
most likely have been condemned as impracticable
and as involving troubles greater than those they
proposed to remedy. Fair notice and joint negotia-
tion were invariably attempted, and industrial peace
was the object.

This mental attitude, even in 1900, is exemplified
in the rules of the General Federation of Trade

46 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Unions. In the very first rule, it is stated to be one
of the objects of the Federation : —

"To promote Industrial Peace and by all
amicable means such as Conciliation, Mediation,
References, or by the establishment of Permanent
Boards, to prevent Strikes or Lockouts between
Employers and Workmen, or disputes between
Trades or Organisations. Where differences do
occur, to assist in their settlement by just and
equitable methods."

These rules were adopted after a series of repre-
sentative conferences, after the keenest discussion,
and after the best minds of the Trade Union move-
ment had spent months in elaborating what they
believed to be the best basis for a general federation
of all Trade Unions. It is interesting to remember
that these rules received the endorsement of the
Trades Union Congress, and that no one has yet
suggested that there should be any alteration in the
principle.

There is no escaping the desire of these pioneers
of the movement to maintain stable trade relation-
ships. At that time, there was no questioning of the
workman's duty to earn the value of the wages he
received. "A fair day's wages and a fair day's
work" was the current aphorism. Men certainly
hoped for better things, but they never hoped to
obtain high wages and a high standard of living
without a commensurately high standard of produc-
tion. These were the days when men were trained
to trades ; when they were proud alike of their skill

TRADE UNIONISM 47

and of their capacity to produce. Then, they
created for themselves opportunities for rational
advancement. Now, the tendency is to wait, with
some indifference, for opportunities to be created.

Had the employing classes of those days been as
wise and as conciliatory as the workmen, the present
confused, embittered, and dangerous situation might
never have arisen. Unhappily, there was always
hostility towards the trade unionist, and, from the
beginning of the nineteenth century to fairly recent
times, the men who accepted offices in the Trade
Unions were, in many ways, penalised by the
employers. In consequence of this, the steadier
fellows, or those with dependents, very often evaded
official responsibility. The various offices thus
became the easy prey of men who held extreme views
and who were always ready to accept opportunities
of pushing them.

It is common, amongst men of a certain type, to
belittle those older Unions and to sneer at the
results they achieved. It is always advisable, how-
ever, to consider circumstances the moment one
endeavours to measure results, and what is of equal
importance is the necessity for endeavouring to
measure the real value and permanency of results.
If this is done, it will be seen that great indeed were
the accomplishments of the men who believed that
honourable adherence to contracts and intelligent
promotion of industrial peace were consistent with
the development of reasonable conditions. These
older leaders secured the right to combine; they

48 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

secured, by constitutional means, and with the aid
of public opinion, the repeal of wickedly obnoxious
laws, and they secured also the right to strike, even
though they expressed a preference for more sensible
methods of settling disputes.

There ought to be no questioning the workman's
right to strike — to withhold his labour, either indi-
vidually or collectively, when the conditions become
too bad, the hours too long, or the wages too low.
The abrogation of this right involves slavery. It is,
however, necessary to differentiate between the strike
against industrial oppression and the strike against
the community.

The strikes of the last century involved the work-
ers in misery and the capitalists in loss. They
prejudiced trade by limiting output, but they often
helped industry and commerce by forcing the use
of machinery. By arresting production, they preju-
diced fortunes, but they did not seriously imperil the
State. That very many of them were justified is
beyond question. If a record of all the strikes had
been kept, together with one of causes and conse-
quences, an impartial jury of to-day, selected from
any class, would agree that in the circumstances of
the times, the strike was often the only means of
redressing the grievances in any given industry.
Many strikes of recent years have been based upon
different conceptions, and have aimed at achieving
entirely different objectives.

Just as law crept in to regulate the relations o|
men in society, so the old trade unionism crept in

TRADE UNIONISM 49

to safeguard the hours of labour and the rewards
of those who laboured. When reasoning failed,
strikes sometimes followed, but only when reasoning
failed. The old strikes were undertaken for the
purpose of compelling capitalists to behave decently.
The new strikes are, too often, undertaken for the
purpose of destroying the capitalist form of indus-
try, or of forcing upon a democratically elected gov-
ernment the will of a revolutionary minority. The
future of industry and commerce receives little con-
sideration from the extremist who engineers politi-
cal strikes, because he assumes that, in the future,
there will be no industries and no commerce as we
know these things. For him, therefore, there is no
need to take any care, or to maintain any sort of
trade balance.

The immediate effects of these new conceptions
vary. A general strike on the railways or in the
building trades does not hurt the workers in these
trades or their employers quite so much or so directly
as similar action hurts the textile or engineering
trades, or that section of the transport workers
concerned in overseas trade, or even the miners who
are engaged in mining coal for export trade. The
first two can, and do, pass on the cost of changed
conditions to the rest of their own people. Whether
the cost of dislocations or advances are met by sub-
sidies or increased fares, or increased rents, matters
little; whatever the media, it is, in fact, their fellow
workers of their own nationality, engaged in other

50 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

occupations, who actually carry the burdens the non-
exporting sections impose.

The work of these sections is performed in their
own country, and is unaffected by foreign compe-
tition. The other trades must sell a very large pro-
portion of all their production in other countries,
and to people whose self-interest is greater than
their altruism. Anything, therefore, which increases
prices, reduces quality, and involves delay in delivery,
reacts injuriously and dangerously. It is these reac-
tions, much more than capitalism or over-production,
which dislocate industry and precipitate unemploy-
ment.

The revolutionary politicians who, for the last
fifteen years, have secured increasing ascendancy
over Trade Unions and their policy, have no reason
to concern themselves with Trade Unions, except as
media of cash, power and advertisement. To them,
Trade Unions offer the means of achieving political
advancement. If these could be cut out of the Trade
Union movement altogether; if Tory, Liberal,
Socialist, Communist, and all the other brands could
be relegated to their proper sphere, the real Trade
Unionist might settle down to the study of the prin-
ciples which underlie and govern trade, and through
trade, employment. Then confidence might return
and industry begin to acquire stability.

Let there be no mistake concerning my atti-
tude towards the Parliamentary representation of
Labour. If Parliamentary idealists aim at securing
an aggregation representative of interests, rather

TRADE UNIONISM 51

than an assembly charged with the furtherance of
the general good, then the presence of Labour is an
absolute necessity. But it is equally necessary to
keep the Trade Union and the political movements
distinct and autonomous. The two movements have
some things in common, but they progress by differ-
ent routes and approach problems of grave impor-
tance from entirely different points of view. It
would be stupid to disregard the possibilities that
arise from collaboration, but it would be equally
stupid to ignore the fundamental differences that
exist, or for either to seek to absorb the other.
Further than this, a political Labour Party may feel
justification for subordinating national interests to
international ones, but the Trade Union movement
might consider itself unable to experiment in altru-
isms of this kind.

Preferring strike to revolution, and being anxious
that the Government should incur no responsibility
for revolution by interfering unduly in the differ-
ences that arise between employers and employed,
I am naturally anxious to secure the best form of
organisation for promoting and conducting strikes
where these become necessary. Such an organisation
should be capable, too, of preventing strikes, because
it is intelligent enough to anticipate events, and
powerful enough to negotiate on equal terms with
any employer or association of employers.

Two forms of Trade Unionism find adherents
in this country; the industrial, and the craft.
Industrial unionism makes place of occupation the

52 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

basis of organisation rather than character of occu-
pation. In other words, it is where a man works,
and not what he does, that is to determine his union,
if industrial unionism dominates. Craft unionism,
on the other hand, follows tradition, and aims at
binding together all who, by similar means, produce
similar results.

In deciding which form of organisation is best,
it is necessary to have regard to the psychological
characteristics of the people, and to the standards
of skill and intelligence which obtain in the areas
the organisation is to cover. In Britain, where the
people are inherently individualists, and where the
standard of skill and intelligence is high, where also
the desire for autonomous self-government amounts
almost to passion, the craft union offers that form
of organisation most likely to succeed, and it is in
the craft union and its logical development that one
expects to find the machine most suitable for the
workman's industrial needs.

It is difficult to imagine any real or ultimate
benefit resulting from any industrial system which
compels craftsmen of various kinds to bury their
craft individuality. Craft organisation at once
promotes pride in skill and capacity, and involves
sympathy and the sense of mutuality amongst the
men who are performing the same kind of work.
The craft union elects men to its executive who
understand the nature and the possibilities of the
businesses they have to deal with, and who are
usually capable of negotiating technical agreements

TRADE UNIONISM 53

with individual employers or employers' associations.

It would be foolish to suggest that the craft union
has reached its highest form of development. With
the increasing modifications in methods of produc-
tion, and the consequent approximation of skills, it
is necessary that the craft unions should take their
position into serious consideration, and evolve, as
a basic contribution for strike and lock-out purposes,
a business-like system of transfers, where men pass
from one phase of industry to another, and an intelli-
gent method of amalgamation where the conditions
in related trades make amalgamation possible. If
this programme were carried out it would result in
a smaller number of unions in related trades, but
the full benefit would not follow unless these unions
or amalgamations of unions were themselves cen-
trally federated. The federation to which the
unions could affiliate should be representative of all
unions, and should possess departments for educa-
tional work, for information and for finance. It
should also concern itself with the study of industrial
diseases, and the collation of statistics concerning
trade, health, unemployment, and mortality.

The Trade Union of the future ought to have at
its service officials who possess a scientific rather
than a dogmatic knowledge of industrial economics,
commercial geography, and international exchange.
They must have sources of information which the
ordinary Trade Union member will regard as
untainted and which will enable them to strike or
wait — whichever is the wiser policy.

54 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

The ordinary principles of insurance must be
adopted by the Trade Union movement if it is to
achieve the maximum of success. The present hap-
hazard method of fixing contributions and benefits
without regard to their actuarial relationship must
be discarded.

All these things the Trade Union can do and have
without merging its identity in organisations differ-
ently constituted and having different objectives, and
without sacrificing its autonomy.

Here lies the great, the immediate, task of the
Trade Unionist — the consolidation of the real
Trade Union movement. Let it decline groupings
which jeopardise its existence and places its members
and its funds under the control and at the service
of men who are not in it, and whose aims are for-
eign to it.

To-day it is servant where it ought to be master.
Its rehabilitation and its salvation lie in freedom
from control by other organisations, in the use of
its funds for industrial instead of political purposes,
in the logical development of the craft ideal, in the
amalgamation of all similar trades, and in the fed-
eration of all amalgamations.

The fight to recover freedom will be bitter, for
those who have invaded the movement will not
easily be driven out. If, however, the straight men
who are Trade Unionists first and politicians after-
wards, will put their hearts into the work, success is
assured. A mass of steady, if undemonstrative,
support is sure to come from people whose conduct

TRADE UNIONISM 55

in recent crises has shown how great is the desire
for constitutional effort and development. The peo-
ple are awakening, and as they understand them-
selves and more clearly understand the facts that
govern trade and employment, they will demand a
form of organisation which cares more for trade
conservation than trade destruction.

The growth of Trade Unions has been extraor-
dinary. To-day there are more members of the
union than the country had inhabitants in 1750.
Not all who enroll apprehend or approve the prin-
ciples of Trade Unionism. Many are members
because they are compelled to be. They may be
expected to go out as lightly as they came in. The
spell of industrial adversity which appears to be
inevitable will try them and find many wanting.
How serious the defection may be depends upon the
period and the extent of the industrial stagnation
which exists.

I, for one, do not for one moment imagine that
these defections will destroy Trade Unionism, but
I do expect them to compel reform and a return to
the principles upon which the movement was origi-
nally founded.

Reformed Trade Unionism will, I believe, readily
accept the statement that the whole is greater than
the part; that the interests of all the people must
come before the interests of any group or section.
It will discountenance strikes which elevate any one
section or trade or any particular occupation at the
expense of others, and its officials will read trade

66 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

barometers more skilfully than the bureaucrats of
Whitehall.

Enlightened by its experiences, it will base its
future enterprises upon the certain knowledge that
Trade Unionism is subsidiary to trade, and that
those who needlessly interfere with the steady opera-
tion and development of trade are the worst enemies
of the Trade Unionist. The movement may be
expected to bury the Red Flag, and resuscitate the
old formula of "neither religion nor politics." It
will enlarge its outlook until this involves considera-
tion of the whole community, and it will, if it realises
the hopes of its well-wishers, come back, after the
suffering and loss and disillusionment of these latter
days, to that conception of Trade Unionism set forth
in the first rule of the General Federation of Trade
Unions.

CHAPTER IV
PERTINENT INTERROGATIONS

OUGHT Trade Unions to support strikes when
strikes have, as a political objective, the
subversion of existing forms of Government?

In such strikes, ought all Trade Unions to support
the section selected for the political experiment, or
should they think the matter out and do what seems
right in the interest of the whole people?

Can class be defined or delimitated, and is class
more important than the common well-being?

Can Trade Unions survive a political cataclysm,
and, even if they can, are they of more actual impor-
tance than the whole country?

Should Trade Unions remain silent and inactive
when they believe that vital and world-reaching
mistakes are being made?

Does class loyalty involve quiet acquiescence in
class suicide? Can democracy be constructive or
maintain authority?

These are some of the questions to be answered
by organised Trade Unionism during the next few
years, if the tendencies of Trade Unions are to be
defined and 'unified.

If political change of the kind adumbrated by
the men who formed the Soviet Council at Leeds in

57

58 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

1917, and advocated in unqualified terms by their
disciples, is really desirable and necessary, would
it not be better to take a plebiscite of the whole of
the people than to permit a minority to force events?
In the present state of the franchise it should be
possible, with little trouble and a comparatively
small cost, to obtain a decision, say, on the following
question :

Are you prepared to supersede the existing
form of democratic Government, and replace it
by a Government consisting of an autocracy, either
self-appointed or appointed by any one section of
those who compose the nation?

Whichever way the answer went, I, for one,
should be prepared to accept the decision; only
reserving to myself the right to seek some other
country if this country decided against the continu-
ance of democratic institutions. Is it conceivable,
however, that the majority of Trade Unionists can
think of supporting action which, having political
objectives, must lead to revolution?

There is no doubt as to the intentions of some
men. They have too little reflective capacity or
discretion to keep their intentions from the public
view; and they have talked of revolution with no
more sense of responsibility than would be required
if they were considering the disposal of a rotten sack
of potatoes. They glibly repeat the phrases bor-
rowed from other times and other men, and resent
the suggestion that revolution which aims at over-

PERTINENT INTERROGATIONS 59

throwing existing forms of society and systems of
Government must involve bloodshed. They will not
believe that the exceptions to this rule are insignifi-
cant, and do not affect the main conclusion, or that
history emphatically emphasises the puerility of
those who advocate revolutions and say they do not
want bloodshed. These revolutionaries know — or
they ought to know — that the moment constitutional
methods are superseded by forceful assumptions of
new national authority, and by forceful appropria-
tions of property, bloodshed becomes inevitable.

There are, from my own point of view, circum-
stances in which it might be not only permissible,
but obligatory, to use all means of achieving a politi-
cal objective.

If a king, or a proletarian assumed autocratic
authority over the lives, the morals, and the wealth
of a State, and exercised his authority for oppression
or his own sole pleasure, no man of courage would
hesitate over revolution. But, and the but is an
important one, if revolution aimed at replacing
social and political democracy by personal or class
autocracy, the favourable interposition of the Trade
Union movement would be an act of madness.

Britain already enjoys social and political democ-
racy, and she has made some expensive experiments
in State democracy. There is nothing that can so
surely prevent the continuance of those experiments
as a revolution involving bloodshed and a violent
change of masters.

Change is necessary. All life is an illustrative

60 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

example of change; but in politics and in an
enlightened community, change should come by
consent, and not by force. Those who suggest
change by violence may aim blows at the Govern-
ment, but the blows will surely fall upon the people.
It would be better if we adopted the simple expe-
dient of bringing from Russia all those who are tired
of revolution, and sending to Russia all those who
want to experiment in revolution. By this means
we might make all the discontents contented.

In strikes having a political objective, should all
Trade Unionists jeopardise their industry to support
the experimenting section ? The answer to this ques-
tion seems to lie in that abused platform platitude :
"The greatest good for the greatest number."

If this answer is given, one may expect the ex-
tremist to say that he is concerned only with the
ultimate good of the greatest number, and prefers
to achieve this by force instead of reason. But none
of us can determine the ultimate good or bad. We
can only take such steps as fit our own times, and
trust to Providence and the intelligence of our chil-
dren and our children's children for the ultimate
good. Trade Unions might survive political cata-
clysm— such, for instance, as a general strike — but
not qua Trade Unions. What they might become
after such an event is suggested by the standing they
have enjoyed under the Soviets in Russia.

Can class be defined or delimitated? In some
countries it might be possible to indicate lines of
demarcation between classes; but in this country

61

they are so diffuse, and the possibilities of transition
are so great, that lines drawn to-day would be useless
to-morrow. There is the danger, too, that any
attempt artificially to separate class from class,
would destroy initiative and invite social disaster.
Many profound lessons are taught by the common
things of life, and even a superficial study of natural
law will give pause to those who wish, by violence,
to reach arbitrary demarcations of class. For my-
self, I only know two classes. The class that tries
to do things for itself, and the class that suffers
things to be done for it.

Ought Trade Unionists to keep silence when
they believe that mistakes are being made, or that
their movement is being used, not for the benefit
of their members, but in order to advance the aims
of political dreamers and schemers?

Every man must have this out with his own con-
science; but the majority, and especially those who
have been frequently involved in expensive and inef-
fective strikes, will decide without hesitation that
they ought to speak out.

The British workers, as a class, are orderly in
character and action; and if they follow their tra-
ditions and convictions and finer inspirations, they
will steer wide of the revolutionaries who have, and
will, endanger their happiness and prosperity.
Already the wild men have increased the cost of
living. In those countries from which we buy our
main stocks of raw materials and food, the exchange
rates are against us; Consols are well below 50; and

62 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

some War Loan Stocks are far below par. Every
further outbreak of the irresponsible extremists dis-
turbs industry and accentuates this situation, and
reduces the value of the poor man's savings and
wages.

The Trade Unionist, therefore, has the impera-
tive duty of speaking out and protesting against
those who will only make social and industrial
experiments in the most expensive way.

That the political Labour Party will endeavour
to displace the other parties and constitute a Gov-
ernment on its own lines, is now certain. The
Labour Party has said so; and society, in faith, or
malice, or hopefulness or hopelessness, has accepted
the Party's dictum.

If and when it comes into power, will the Labour
Party succeed in making trade better or man hap-
pier? There's the rub. It will start with a very
heavy handicap. It has sown a crop of promises,
and it cannot escape the harvest. The economic
fantasies advocated by various of its groups have
appealed to the unthinking as a fairy tale appeals to
a child, and there will be terrible disappointment if
the promised employment fails to materialise, or
the money to pay unemployment benefit cannot be
extracted from an over-taxed and debt-embarrassed
country.

Levies on capital are, or were, easy and attractive
subjects to talk about. They appear to offer such
simple and efficacious means of meeting financial
liabilities. To-day, not so much is said on this sub-

PERTINENT INTERROGATIONS 63

ject. Its discussion has shown, not only the diffi-
culties of preparing and giving effect to any scheme,
but has emphasised the fact that to unduly tax capi-
tal is to dissipate it, either by forcing it to find sanc-
tuary in other countries, or to encourage wasteful
spending in order to dodge taxation.

Even those who were originally enamoured of this
way of meeting indebtedness are now beginning to
see that it is better for man to earn his own living
than to poach on the savings of his neighbour or his
grandfather.

Apart from, but in addition to, the financial lia-
bilities and social expectations which will await it,
a Labour Government would be faced with problems
to which, as a Party, it has given little attention.
It will have to govern an Empire, even though within
its ranks imperialism has been anathema. The
Dominions, India, and Ireland cannot be dismissed
by the utterance of a phrase or the passing of a reso-
lution. Their interests are interwoven with, and for
the time being dependent upon, those of Great
Britain. The consideration of these interests will
call for the exercise of capabilities not yet mani-
fested by the Labour Party. Mistakes will bring
swift punishment from those who have been led to
expect too much.

To maintain good relationships with old friends,
whilst essaying to heal the wounds of recent enemies,
will require statesmanship of the highest order.

Wrapped up with this question of Empire goyeiv
nance is the problem of the Navy and Army. The

64 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

attitude a Labour Government would adopt towards
the twin services can hardly be guessed, because,
hitherto, while there has been considerable exploita-
tion of Navy and Army circumstances, there has
been no definite programme put forth for the con-
stitution and maintenance of either force. Yet there
is a point below which even a Labour Government
dare not carry its negligence of national and imperial
defence. Perhaps one is justified in assuming that
because the majority of those who form the Labour
Party are Socialists, they will, in order to cut the
cost of the Navy and Army, admit and enforce
universal liability to Naval and Military service, and
that this liability will be supplemented by a com-
pulsory form of training sufficient to maintain neces-
sary efficiency.

What of Democracy? Democracy in society
makes for millenniums; but democracy in govern-
ment may easily make for decadence of authority.
Democracy can destroy, but history suggests that it
cannot construct, except in circumstances where the
issues are confined and simple. In Britain, democ-
racy in government shows signs of failure. The
return of autocracy is threatened; whether it be an
autocracy of intelligence or one of ignorance,
remains to be seen.

The decadence of authority begins in the homes,
goes through the schools, and dangerously affects
the State. The signs have long been obvious to those
who viewed the situation without political prejudice,
or the possibilities of political preference. Warn-

PERTINENT INTERROGATIONS 65

ings to the Government have been frequent, but they
have fallen on the deaf ears of Ministers who were
busy with their own immediate affairs, or who were
under the directing control of their own Depart-
mental Chiefs, or who, having forgotten the lessons
of history taught in their universities, have failed
to learn those of the times in which they live.

Government, as science and art, plus inspiration,
has long been decaying. Not what was right, but
what was expedient, has become the object of the
politician, who masqueraded in the garb of states-
manship. No man defended the right unless it was
politically safe to do so. Ultimate results have been
sacrificed to immediate advertisement. Those who,
in one session of Parliament, have raved against the
giving of doles, have, in the next session, out-doled
the dolists. No man occupying or usurping the seat
of a Statesman has dared to say to the people that
unless they work they must starve; or if they use
force to destroy equilibriums, force will be used to
destroy them.

Successive Governments have endured the licen-
tiousness of the minority and allowed the majority
to be terrorised and impoverished. Occasionally
there has been a pretence of punishment of particu-
larly flagrant offences against law and order, or when
one or two revolutionaries have viciously arrested
national productivity; but not one of the punish-
ments inflicted has been equal in severity to a week's
service in the trenches. The criminal with anti-

66 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

social tendencies has had a much more "cushy" time
than the duty-loving patriotic soldier.

Parliament, as a whole, has too many members
and too little capacity. Six hundred members of
both houses would be more likely to recover control
than thirteen hundred and fifty. The situation,
unfortunately, cannot wait upon Parliamentary re-
form; each day increases both the danger and the
difficulty. Action must be definite and clear, and its
aim must be to arrest the diseases which threaten
to destroy Britain. Disobedience to the law of the
land, and to the law which is over the land, must be
definitely and swiftly dealt with. The means
adopted will be approved, or condoned, or con-
demned in the light of results.

It should be the immediate policy of all parties
to rid the Government of excrescences that hamper
and endanger. Over and over again has the Govern-
ment been warned of the danger of interfering with
matters outside their sphere; time after time has it
been pointed out that such interference might pre-
vent some strikes, but only at the ultimate cost of
revolution. Neither Governments nor Parliaments
can override economic law, and the attempt to do so
has brought revolution very near to us. Get back,
or perhaps forward, to sane conceptions; let capital
and labour settle their differences between them-
selves, and let the State content itself by keeping the
ring, interfering legislatively only when life and
health and material are in danger.

The strikes of to-day are not against capital, they

PERTINENT INTERROGATIONS 67

are against society — society as represented by the
hundreds of thousands of girls and women who
tramp to work through the snow and slush because
a few motormen misunderstand or desire to repu-
diate a contract, or a few railwaymen are dis-
gruntled. Some strikers realise the baleful effects
their actions must have on the community and on
trade, but their faith in authority's power to protect
them has weakened, and they drift to the side of the
revolutionary.

The task of recovery will be great. During the
last fifteen years, many thousands of officials have
been created; these all struggle for the expansion
of their Departments and the enlargement of their
functions. Many call themselves Socialists, but they
are promoting and assisting anti-social develop-
ments.

Is there a man strong enough to tackle the job?
Strong enough to tell the people the truth and to
meet force by force if needs be? Upon the answer
to this question depends the future of Britain and
the fate of the British Empire. The majority are
waiting for the man, and will follow him almost
blindly.

CHAPTER V
UNEMPLOYMENT: CAUSES AND REMEDIES

AMONGST the millions who are to-day unem-
ployed are hundreds of thousands who fought
for the political life of Britain and for the safety
of the people who were fortunate enough to remain
at home. The tragedy behind this crowd, which is
at once landless and workless, must move to sympa-
thy every man and woman in Britain. It ought to
do more — very much more. It ought to move the
whole people to the instant and scientific study of
causes and remedies as well as to the application
of palliatives.

The situation has not developed without warning.
The signs of its coming were as flaming as, and much
more threatening than, the Northern Lights. It
needed neither especial sagacity nor profound knowl-
edge to see that collapse must follow the crisis and
the political madness which, initiated in 1918, en-
couraged false hopes and condoned unjustifiable
extravagance.

As far back as March 2nd, 1919, I wrote:

"Industry cannot be operated successfully if
the wages paid exceed the value of the articles
68

UNEMPLOYMENT 69

produced. In such circumstances, industry ceases
to be profitable and can only be carried on by the
depletion of reserves and with the certainty of
bankruptcy.

"It was the same with Housing. Subsidies
seemed so easy and so natural to speakers
upon whom it never dawned that new houses
would be subsidised at the expense of the old
ones, or that the better paid artisan would, by
appropriating the new houses, increase the bur-
dens of the very poor. Houses were needed, but
it was not necessary to obscure or disregard the
incidence of cost.

"What applies to uneconomic wages and hous-
ing schemes applies with even greater force to
so-called non-contributory schemes of unemploy-
ment benefit. All costs falls ultimately not upon
dividends, nor upon hoarded wealth, but upon
the recreative capacity of the people.

"It is always the worker who pays and it is
imperative that the worker secures real value for
money paid, even though the payments are made
to his own class.

"Just as surely as he suffers if he squanders
individual resources, so he suffers if he dissi-
pates or permits the dissipation of national re-
sources."

"High wages, short hours, cheap food and
cheap housing accommodation are desirable
things, but they are impossible apart from high
efficiency and maximum production.

"Unless he learns this lesson, the worker will
pay in unemployment and in personal degradation
and he will involve his wife and his children in
his debts and their consequences."

70 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Endeavouring to emphasise the coming dangers,
I said, on March 6th, 1919:

"Throughout Britain, there are hundreds of
thousands of sound trade unionists who fear the
consequences of unauthorised and irresponsible
strikes. Their fears are accentuated by the com-
mercial situation which is developing."

"Tin plates are already on the market at 203.
per ton less than British cost prices. Steel is
being offered by Britain's competitors at a much
lower rate than Britain can produce it, even with
the aid of a subsidy.

"Lancashire, with 75 per cent, of her trade
overseas is faced with offers at 30 per cent, lower
than present cost prices, while America is pre-
pared to put coal into markets formerly monopo-
lised by the British at rates very little in excess of
what it will cost Britain to place coal in the port
of export.

"These are the facts, and no matter how
unpleasant they appear, they have to be faced
and dealt with. It is no use appealing to
Parliament for a solution of this problem. The
industries must themselves find a solution or go
out of business.

"Fortunately, the mass of the people are full
of common sense, and most of them can still
appreciate consequences that must follow any fail-,
ure on the part of Britain to maintain her export
trade.

"Without export there can be no regular
employment for the mass, and without employ-
ment, millions of perfectly innocent people — men,
women and children — will be overwhelmed with
tragic suffering."

UNEMPLOYMENT 71

Nothing was done, and in September, 1920,
endeavouring to interest the Trade Unions, I wrote
that:

"To discover the real causes of unemployment
and the real remedies would be worth all the
money the Trade Union movement possesses. To
go on repeating the old formulae in face of the
world's facts will be folly of the worst kind. It
is no use talking about the right to work unless
we can discover the laws that govern work and
the proper way of applying them."

Machinery to deal with effects, expensive and
derogatory to moral qualities, was indeed installed,
but nothing was done to remove or even to palliate
root causes. Men continued, and were content to
continue, in an atmosphere of hazy assumption and
vague generality. For years they had been content
to assert that unemployment was due to over-
production, and this in spite of the efforts of sane
economists to discredit the fallacy. Sporadic and
particular cases of unemployment may indeed be
caused by the temporary failure of industries or
areas to distribute the commodities they have pro-
duced, but to assert that over-production is the sole,
or even the general, cause of unemployment is to
invite the critic to say that the corollary would be
equally true and that under-production would find us
all busily occupied. Not even the Council of Action
has been foolish enough to put this latter propo-
sition into terms.

While most of us are now satisfied that over-

72 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

production is not the cause of unemployment, and
that there has been no over-production of essential
commodities, we are not satisfied that any of us
apprehend the cause or all the causes, nor does it
seem possible at any time to indicate complete and
perpetual remedies. It is, however, possible to carry
the probing of the problem much further than the
majority have.

The more closely this subject is studied, the more
difficult it seems to enunciate any formula that
expresses the whole truth concerning unemployment.

In the first place, it is necessary to break away
from the common practice of reasoning only from
immediate and obvious circumstances. Unemploy-
ment is not a new problem, nor is it consequential
upon the war, though war intensifies it. In 1909,
when there were no war consequences to confound
commercial and industrial enterprises, the Board of
Trade returns showed, at one time, and in a number
of occupations, unemployment affected 9^ per cent,
of the people engaged. It is evident, therefore, that
if we would form tenable conceptions of fundamen-
tal causes, we must go further back than 1920 or
1909.

Recently, it was argued that poverty supplied the
basic cause, but closer consideration suggested that
poverty was an attendant circumstance rather than
a cause, and that it would be necessary to go deeper
still. The more men thought, the more they were
inclined to the conception of a set of causes which
might be divided into what appeared to be actuating

UNEMPLOYMENT 73

and precipitating causes. The actuating cause,
though not the only cause, which obtruded itself
with the persistency of a recurring decimal, was the
disappearance of equilibrium between natural re-
sources and national needs.

By natural resources I mean the area and quality
of the soil; the nature and variety of indigenous
crops; the character and accessibility of minerals;
the geographical situation and the climatic condi-
tions. While these, plus certain human attributes,
are equal to the maintenance of the population at
current standards of existence, there is little danger
of unemployment, except such as arises from the
moral or physical ineptitudes of individuals.

It is when the population outgrows the natural
resources of a country that the possibility of unem-
ployment and starvation and death emerges and
compels the dispersal of populations or the higher
development of human attributes and the acquire-
ment of what I must, for the moment, describe as
extraneous resources.

It is impossible to say exactly when the need
for these additional resources actually developed.
Englishmen, because of their restlessness, and
Scotsmen, because of their impecuniosity, have, for
centuries, sought better conditions in many lands.
Whether, or when, the -earlier adventurers ex-
hausted the possibilities of their own countries, does
not clearly appear, but the fact that Edward III
fixed wages and working conditions by statute sug-

74 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

gests that employment was not all that was desirable
in the fourteenth century.

In 1 80 1, the population of England and Wales
had risen to 8,892,000, and it is clear from the
annals of the times that natural resources were then
carrying a fairly full load and that any very appre-
ciable addition to the population could only be sup-
ported if the resources of other lands were acquired
and exploited.

Investigators, inventors and adventurers were,
however, at work. Coalfields were exploited; the
modern steam engine was discovered; sailors and
soldiers and merchants opened up territories and
opportunities, and the balance between internal
resources and national needs was temporarily and
perhaps indifferently adjusted.

More than recovery took place. The enterprise
of the thinkers and the fighters made possible the
extraordinary increase in population which took
place between 1801 and 1901. Remember it was
the same old country, the same area, the same soil;
patches of gravel, of sand, of loam and of clay, with
hills of chalk and mountains of stone; the same
variable climate, and yet the area that was support-
ing 8,892,000 in 1801, was supporting 32,000^000
in 1901.

While recovery took place, the conditions of life
became less stable. Instead of agriculture being the
base upon which Britain built, it was industrialism,
and industrialism is always more susceptible to
fluctuation than is agriculture. The raw material

UNEMPLOYMENT 75

of the agriculturist is always at hand, and he may
maintain life by directly consuming his own produc-
tions. Not so the industrialist. He must buy from
varied and frequently distant markets the raw mate-
rials he manipulates, and the products of his industry
can only be consumed in small part by himself. They
must be exchanged, and any circumstance which
adversely affects his capacity to exchange, leaves him
idle and in peril. It is in disturbance of equilibrium
between natural resources and national needs and in
failing capacities for exchange that we must seek for
the basic causes of unemployment.

The line of demarcation between basic and pre-
cipitating causes is not always clear. Failure to
effect remunerative exchange may stand in both
categories, and whether it is war that arrests, or
industrial inefficiency which accentuates, the results
are pretty much the same. The thousands of mil-
lions whose existence depends upon the sale or ex-
change, rather than the personal consumption, of
the things they make, find their occupations gone,
though their appetites remain. Ignorance, waste,
and economic misdirection, are attendant causes of
unemployment and have had their share in the de-
velopment of the situation which exists in Britain
to-day, and whether we consider remedies or pallia-
tives, we fail unless we educate the people, eliminate
waste, and acquire a sense of obedience to economic
law.

To-day, it may be argued that we spend enough
on education. We spend too much on education

76 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

which attaches more importance to subjects than it
does to character. There is no need to spend more,
or at present to provide further facilities. What is
needed most is a development of inclinations, and
every man and woman who is capable of feeling any
sense of responsibility, can become an unpaid teacher
of the things that make for national greatness. No
new buildings are needed for this class of teacher,
but their unofficial and voluntary and inexpensive
efforts can effect greater moral changes than all
Whitehall's machinery.

It is only an educated democracy — and by edu-
cated I mean, possessing a developed sense of right
and practicability, that can appreciate either the need
for, or the means of, securing balance between what
they produce and what they require. It is only an
educated democracy that will face the basic facts
of unemployment, and take the apparently brutal
steps necessary to secure amelioration which does
not involve increased liability. I am, therefore, all
for education, provided it is of the right kind.

In 1801, we had a population of 8,892,000.
To-day we have 46,000,000. Obviously, they can-
not all live by tilling the soil, because there is not1
enough soil, and their attempts during the last year
or two to live upon each other have not been wholly
successful. The alternatives that present themselves
will not appeal to the mendicants or to the Utopians,
but there is no escaping their inevitability. Either
you transfer the people who want food to the lands
which grow food, or you increase the variety and the

UNEMPLOYMENT 77

quality and the saleability of the goods your people
manufacture, and also your capacity as world car-
riers of merchandise, or you starve and deteriorate
until your effectiveness is less than the cheaper yellow
and brown men, and then, you go out. Go out,
and give place to the more adaptable.

It is dangerous to a degree to continue on the
assumption that the Almighty will continue to inter-
pose special providences between Britain and disso-
lution.

Assuming that the foregoing conceptions of cause
and remedies are accepted and that the people are
prepared to emigrate or to increase the selling value
of the goods they produce, the question arises as
to how we shall deal with the suffering and want
which already exists.

Amplify immediately your plans for emigration.
The Colonial Office has already done something, but
it can, and must, do more. Means of transport and
means of subsistence must be temporarily provided.
Those who go out must be directed to the best places
and aided in their search for work. Communication
between them and the Homeland and the other
Dominions must be maintained in order to encourage
their sense of common relationship. With proper
care, it should, in this way, be possible to transform
many human liabilities into human assets.

There are objections to emigration. They come
from people whose grounds for objection differ
greatly. Some are political, some are sentimental,
and some may be quite selfish. The revolutionary

78 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

objects to emigration because it removes congestion
and discontent, and interferes with his programme.
The legislator with a sense of responsibility objects
because he believes that only the best and most enter-
prising face the risks, and that their departure im-
poverishes the remainder. The sentimentalist thinks
of the old flag and the broken home circle; and the
selfish one in these lands that are not yet overflowing
with population, fears that his privileged position
may be encroached upon.

I have no concern with, or for, those who preach
the doctrine of discontent. At best it is a miserable
doctrine, and it may easily become a disastrous one.
I sympathise with the statesman who fears the
consequences of reducing the average of strength and
enterprise, and I can easily weep with those who
imagine the old flag without defenders and the fire-
side without particular loved ones; but neither their
fears nor my tears can help the situation. It is bad
to contemplate life outside one's Homeland, but it
is worse to contemplate starvation and death within
its borders.

There are people in the Dominions who offer but
frigid welcome to those who seek to transfer them-
selves and their fortunes from Britain to the lands
which Britain colonised. But their numbers are few,
and their influence would be negligible provided the
people on the other side were made partners in the
enterprise. We must expect antagonism to ill-
digested schemes. Any dumping in British markets,
of foreign goods, creates annoyance, and we must not

UNEMPLOYMENT 79

regard as unreasonable the Canadian, the Austra-
lian, the New Zealander, or the South African who
objects to human, and sometimes damaged freight
being dumped upon his shores without a "by your
leave."

The Dominions' need of population is just as
great as is our need of relief from over-pressure.
Figures concerning densities are illuminating.
The number of persons to the square mile in Britain
is 618; in Canada it is less than 2! Australia has
an area forty-two times that of Britain, yet her
population is about five-sevenths of that of Greater
London. South Africa has millions of acres upon
which white men may live and multiply. Whatever
justification there may be for ousting the aboriginal
disappears if his conqueror and successor fails to
replenish the land.

Recently, I have discussed this problem with
representative and sympathetic Canadians. "We
need your money, and we need your men, but don't
send us counterfeits." "If you think we are aiming
at graft, you're wrong, and if it will comfort you,
we will make joint arrangements for the protection
of both interests — yours and ours."

An Imperial Conference is shortly to be held.
The Premiers from overseas are even now gathering
to discuss matters relating to the welfare of the
Empire. I have no wish to detract from the dignity
and the capacity of the men who are coming, but I
am certain a solution of the problems of emigration
and immigration will be unduly delayed if the trade

80 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

unionists of the territories concerned are left outside
the conference. I am certain that in Canada, Tom
Moore and Harry Halford and P. M. Draper,
whom I am proud to number amongst my personal
friends, understand their own situation and sym-
pathise with ours. The same applies to Archie
Crawford in South Africa, while Australians know
that they must encourage association with white
men or risk succumbing to yellow men. Get your
Imperial conference, but let us include those whose
business it is to maintain wage standards and decent
conditions; including them in the discussions and
making them parties to the arrangements will vitiate
antagonism and encourage co-operation.

More efficient production may be regarded as
complementary to emigration, or as an alternative.
More efficient production should aim at increasing
quantities and qualities and distributing facilities
without trespassing upon the workman's legitimate
opportunities to maintain health, to develop intelli-
gence and moral, and to enjoy social and family
amenities. The intellectual and mechanical aids to
production should be exploited to the full, but the
operating factors — the men and the women — must
be mercifully dealt with. After all, they are made
in the image of God, and it cannot be God's will
that their lives should be seared and defaced.

I have referred to distributive facilities and their
necessary increase. For seaport towns, this is
indeed a matter of the greatest importance. In
such places the people will tell you that Britain

UNEMPLOYMENT 81

makes more by selling goods than she does by manu-
facturing them, and that her prosperity is greatest
when her carrying trade is most buoyant; when her
ships float over the seven seas and into unnumbered
ports.

These people are right. Apart from her ships,
Britain cannot exist. They feed her; they keep her
in touch with her outer boundaries, and they main-
tain inviolate her inner shores. But here also there
is room for improvement, and if unemployment is
to be combated, then those who go down to the
sea in ships, and those who direct operations, must
gather together, not to secure sectional triumphs,
but to raise efficiency and to produce economy.

Must we always ignore palliatives? This ques-
tion is often asked, and the answer should always
be — No! Personally, however, I differentiate be-
tween remedies that go to the root and palliatives
that weaken moral or dissipate capital. The pallia-
tive proposals that have been most consistently
pushed upon the public are represented by the
phrases, "Stabilise exchanges," "Trade with Rus-
sia," "Levy on Capital," "State Maintenance,"
"Credit System."

Stabilising exchanges has, for many months, been
the panacea of every superficial politician. One has
been nauseated by the parrot-like injunction to the
Government to do what the gratuitous adviser had
no conception of doing. Stabilise them indeed —
but how? The King, taking the matter seriously,
and having the people instead of a party to consider,

83 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

declares that this stabilising will keep the nations
heavily occupied for many years. The seeker after
cheap popularity would sweep aside this obstacle to
national recovery as easily as he would remove the
froth from a pint of porter.

Stabilising exchanges is a lengthy process; in the
meantime, what about the hungry?

Trade with Russia is advocated as another in-
fallible way of finding employment. I am certain
that trading under the auspices of the present
government of Russia would find employment, but
whether it would find remuneration is another
matter. It has never seemed to dawn upon the
communist advocates of Trade with Russia that it
would, under existing circumstances, mean work
without pay, or at best, promise of deferred pay.
That may be an acceptable doctrine at the gather-
ing of the Red International, but it won't go down
with the British Trade Unionist. Trade with Russia
by all means. Trade with anyone who can give a
quid pro quo. Beyond this I have yet to learn that
the Government places any obstacles in the way of
traders who are prepared to carry their own risks.

"Establish a credit system," cries another palli-
ator. During the war Britain went a long way in
this direction, for she lent her Allies and her
Dominions £1,852,233,269. If that sum were re-
paid to-morrow it would enable the Chancellor of the
Exchequer to liquidate our money debt to America
and to reduce taxation, and by so doing to assist a
revival of commercial and industrial activity. It

UNEMPLOYMENT 83

may be possible to lend more, or to send out more
goods on mere promises to pay, but the safer policy
seems to be that of bringing the price of our mer-
chandise within the purchasing capacity of those
peoples who, because of our price and our delayed
deliveries, are seeking other sellers.

"Levy capital" has been the proposal of many,
and it is said that even the Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer regarded the proposition with favour. It
is still the premier plank in the programme of the
Labour Party. Of all the easy solutions of existing
problems this seems the most attractive. It claims
to take from him that hath all that he has, and to
give to him that hath not all that he hasn't.

It never seems to strike the advocates of this
solution that capital is essential to the maintaining
the expansion of industry, or that its dissipation
accentuates the difficulties of to-day. In the face of
the facts of rating and taxation, one wonders how
the advocates of capital levies, or the latest form of
the same proposal — a tax on accumulated wealth —
would proceed. It is said that local rates,
which in 1904 were about £100,000,000, had risen
in 1919 to £194,000,000, and are estimated to
rise in 1921 to £250,000,000, while we know that
Imperial taxation has risen from £200,000,000 to
£1,400,000,000.

These figures suggest that the real palliatives lie,
not in the direction of increased levies or taxation,
but in decreased expenditures. You cannot have
your cake if you have eaten it, and you cannot de-

84 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

velop your trade with capital that has been dissi-
pated.

"State maintenance." Here the position is not
easy. The State has made many demands upon
men; it has made them many promises; it has weak-
ened moral fibre, and by continued interferences
in trade and commerce, it has hampered recoveries.
It is, consequently, under obligations which justify
a demand for assistance. But this assistance, in the
nature of things, can only be temporary. Sooner or
later, the reserve of liquid capital will be exhausted
and doles become impossible. The formula, "main-
tenance or work," has been amended to read: "Pref-
erably remunerative work." Maintenance without
work means universal pauperism, to be followed by
national bankruptcy. Work at preferably remunera-
tive rates implies the possibility of subsidised work,
which is another form of pauperism, or it means
work which produces articles which can be sold in
the world's markets at prices which leave a margin
for wages. The question arises as to who is to
organise the work, who is to sell the articles, and
who is to fix the wages. The answer presumably is,
the State. In that case, God help the workman.

Attempts must be made to maintain those who
cannot obtain employment, but the community cannot
be expected to maintain those who evade work.
Every time this is attempted the common standards
are lowered, the aggregate liability increases and
the conditions which precipitate unemployment be-
come more acute.

UNEMPLOYMENT 85

It should be the business of the Trade Unions
and the Employers' Associations to see that neither
men nor women willing to work, lack opportunity.
In the new Trade Unionism which I hope to see
develop, it will be understood that unemployment
of the able-bodied is quite as dangerous to the
Unions as it is to the community. It always effects
reductions in wages, or, to be more accurate, in the
value of wages. These reductions are not always
obvious, but they are, nevertheless, real. The cash
received by those employed may be the same, but
public opinion in Britain has decreed that the willing
worker shall not starve, and if he does not earn his
own living, it must be earned for him by the people
who remain at work. The days of manna are passed,
and there are no longer inexhaustible cruses of oil.

In this matter, the Trade Unions must readjust
their outlook. The fear of future unemployment
impels them to inflict present unemployment upon
men of their own class. That is, indeed, the real
class war. The fact that 250,000 able-bodied ex-
service men were unemployed, whilst others were
working overtime, or holding up production, con-
stitutes the gravest kind of industrial scandal.

It is held by many Trade Unionists, and by the
dilettanti who advise them, that the effective ab-
sorption of these men would lead to continued over-
production and an accentuation of unemployment. I
very seriously ask those who hold this view to study
the world's circumstances, and to face courageously
the conclusions these circumstances suggest. The

86 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

fact that millions are dying for want of goods, and
that millions who can make goods are unemployed,
suggests that many earlier conclusions are wrong,
and that there are other and graver causes of unem-
ployment. It is the duty of the Trade Unions to
probe the circumstances until these causes are laid
bare and the real remedies propounded.

An investigation such as I suggest will probably
prove that as like breeds like, so work accomplished
breeds the possibility of more work to undertake;
that employment tends to create employment by de-
veloping purchasing power. Much of the hostility
to the absorption of the unemployed in industries
that require labour is due to carefully fostered
prejudices and to the mistaken idea that price and
value are synonymous terms. Men may receive very
high prices for their work, without these prices en-
abling them to purchase comfort.

The problem which confronts us increases in com-
plexity with each erroneous attempt to solve it. It
is necessary to keep our people alive, but it is also
necessary to elaborate means of maintaining balance
between what our country can produce in the way of
food and raw material and what our people need
to maintain existence. Other people may have better
solutions, but I feel that we must either decrease
our numbers and our standards of living, or increase
our capacity for profitable exchange in overseas
markets.

CHAPTER VI
LABOUR UNREST

UNREST is not a phenomenon of to-day. It is
as eternal and almost as mysterious as the
tides. It has found expression in all times and
amongst all peoples. It really began when the
second man saw the first and realised that priority
might have given advantage.

In the elementary stages, it lacks sentiency, and
is impulsive rather than cohesive and consecutive.
It has areas and periods of quiescence. Those who
live in these periods often mistake quiescence for
dissolution. Because unrest has ceased to be ob-
viously expressive, it is sometimes assumed to be
dead. Upon its percussion and repercussion depends
the progress of peoples and the development of
empires.

Its expression appears to be good or bad ac-
cording as education and understanding and oppor-
tunity offer. Inasmuch as it represents force and
motion, it is dynamic in character and it manifests
itself in fear and doubt, in resentment, in avarice,
and in violence. Fortunately, it also finds general
and even more forceful expression in courage, in
magnanimity, in generosity, and in desire for orderly
progression.

87

88 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Amongst the mass of men, there is always fear
arising out of the danger to life, to health, to finan-
cial and social position. There are also the fears
concerning food and shelter and the fate of depend-
ents and as life passes the autumnal stage and ap-
proaches winter, there is the tragic fear of the days
when capacities are overstrained, resources are ex-
hausted, and old age points the way to death.

It may be blessed to be poor in spirit, but there
is no blessedness in material poverty. It is popularly
believed that Dives went to Hell, while the poor
beggar went to the land fit for heroes. Nevertheless,
the common predilection is still in favour of the posi-
tion and chances of Dives. There are no willing
candidates for the beggarship, but many for the
position of the rich man; and that in spite of post-
mortem risks.

Resentment follows fear and is excited and intensi-
fied by vulgar ostentation. The sights outside the
popular restaurants and the ostentatious advertise-
ment of expensive society functions are maddening
to the workless or the ill-fed, and it is difficult for
the poor woman to avoid this resentment when she
beholds another of her sex with two hundred pounds
of flesh on her body and two thousand pounds worth
of rings on her fingers.

Avarice is a common expression of unrest. It
is always seeking to possess without giving equivalent
returns, or without considering the effect of its
operations upon others. Avarice is not the proprie-
tary vice of the poor; the worship of the golden

LABOUR UNREST 89

calf is more common in Lombard Street than in
Walworth Road. But the most terrifying expres-
sions of unrest are the violent outbreaks against
personal property. The circumstances which usually
precede such outbreaks — unemployment and poverty
— may be often ignored by the authorities; but, once
unrest passes from the active to the destructive, the
whole community must become intensely interested.

Whenever unrest is accentuated by unemployment
and poverty, the baser kind of politician finds ample
opportunities. Sometimes he is actuated by spleen;
sometimes by ambition; and sometimes he plays
upon the fears and suffering of the unfortunate
for the purpose of furthering his own material for-
tunes. Sometimes, again, it is ignorance of causes
and inevitable effects which leads these baser poli-
ticians to incite others to violence and theft. Those
who lack knowledge, or are without proper feeling,
or who hope to make things right by doing things
wrong, are actively employed to-day. They are
everywhere advising the poverty-stricken and work-
less to satisfy their needs and desires by ^iolent theft.

That force is no remedy is an axiom which ought
to be dinned into the ears of the blatant advocates
of force, and also into the ears of those baser souls,
who, lacking the courage openly to advocate violence,
reiterate in their speeches in tones of approval the
assertion that men are losing patience, and may be
expected to take forcibly anything they may want.

The repetition of this platitude may do quite as
much harm as the open incitement. Whether this

90 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

doctrine of violence is preached or insinuated, it is
a damnable one. Put into practice, it must evolve
waste of the worst kind, and suffering far in excess
of what is at present being endured; for whatever
looting takes place, half of the property stolen is
invariably wasted. The greater part of the balance
falls into the hands of professional thieves, and the
real unemployed, instead of being assisted, are still
further prejudiced.

There is another consideration which ought to
weigh with the unemployed and their advisers, and
that is that the looter is no respecter of persons.
He will just as readily steal from the poor as from
the rich. The consideration, however, which weighs
most with me is that the wealth of Great Britain is
mostly in building and machinery; in ability and
goodwill. If you burn and otherwise destroy your
buildings and machinery, your ability and your good-
will suffer the most deadly handicap. This handicap
can only be overcome by suffering and labour, which,
had there been no violence, would have been quite
unnecessary. The form of unrest which finds expres-
sion in violence and theft is the most reprehensible
of all. It offers, apparently, an easy way, but takes,
in fact, all but the few along a road that is strewn
with thorns.

The treatment of unrest must be educative, as
well as palliative. Unfortunately, education has
been left too much in the hands of the professional.
To remedy this, every man and woman /should
become an educative force, teaching by example and

LABOUR UNREST 91

precept the things concerning life. Further, all their
lessons should be based on a love of right and a
desire to promote both in the individual, and in the
community, right thinking and right action. Any
system of education, whether professional or volun-
tary, which sets the material above the moral is self-
condemned, and fails to envisage unrest and harness
it to good purposes. It is better to appreciate the
Decalogue than to understand the Differential
Calculus.

Education is needed by all classes. No vacuities
are more intolerable than are those of people who
regard life as an interlude between birth and death,
which can be spaced by exercises in physical adorn-
ment and physical gratification.

In addition to education, however, there must be
a universal conservation of the means of livelihood.
There must be no waste, Governmental or individual,
to give rise to that form of unrest which arises from
resentment against removable hardship.

People are justified in being resentful with the
Government for every form of waste; for the en-
couragement of expenditures which are desirable,
but inopportune; for imposing taxes which vitiate
enterprise, and for subsidising some trades at the
expense of others. Where they go wrong is when
they assume that they can make the Government
pay for its mistakes. The Government never pays
anything; it only hands over, from one section of the
community to the other, monies that have been de-
rived from the earnings of men.

92 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

State payment and State maintenance, which are
being urged as palliatives for unrest, appeal with
less force to-day than they did yesterday. The
people are beginning to realise that salvation is a
personal matter, in economics quite as well as in
religion. The folly of depending upon the State
for every human need and aspiration has become
obvious; and the people are groping after better
means of satisfying their wants.

Everywhere, men are realising the failure of
legislation effected hastily, at the instance of
theorists, and too often enforced by Orders in
Council. They are seeing that Acts of Parlia-
ment, passed with the best of intentions, do not
always produce the results intended. Taxing other
people's property or enterprise has always been an
agreeable occupation, but the pleasure decreases
when the effect of the taxation is opposite to the
intention of those who framed it.

To-day we are seeing the dispersion of large
estates, and this is said to be a matter of deliberate
policy, but the results are not all that were expected.
The big landowner is forced by taxation to sell ; the
tenant farmer is afraid of disturbance and ambi-
tiously buys up his holding. In doing this, he uses
up all his ready money, and in all probability saddles
himself with a mortgage and involves himself in a
period of heartbreaking effort which may end only
at his death. The framers of this legislation in-
tended only to kill the big landowner; but they may,

LABOUR UNREST 93

in fact, kill his tenant and throw his tenant's la-
bourers out of employment.

Lancashire has its own example of the perversity
of intention. The delegates from its Trade Unions
and political groups have been attending various
trades and labour conferences where perfervid reso-
lutions in favour of Home Rule for India have been
carried with exultant unanimity. India has not been
given Home Rule, but she has been given a much
greater measure of power, and one of her first uses
of this power has been to impose a protective tariff
against Lancashire goods.

It is not necessary for the delegates who helped
to give India the power she is now using to apologise
or explain. Everyone who knows them, knows that
they never consciously intended to hurt their own
people; but, they had drifted into politics. They
were against the Government; they succumbed to
idealism. But Lancashire finds the way into her
best market narrowed and her staple industry handi-
capped at a time when she is badly hit from other
directions.

In order to relieve some forms of unrest there
must be concerted provision against social and in-
dustrial accidents. Sickness, unemployment, super-
annuation and death are contingencies which beget
fear; and they must be dealt with if unrest is to be
circumscribed and utilised for progress instead of
for destruction. The State's efforts to meet these
contingencies are neither complete nor successful.
In sickness there is malingering amongst women and

94. WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

men; the medical service is ineffective, and the old
voluntary care and control have given place to pro-
fessionalism or quasi-professionalism. In unemploy-
ment insurance there is much downright dishonesty
that goes undetected because the people either do
not realise their true interest, or because they con-
sider it bad form to help the Government against
the thief who steals benefits.

Old age, too, is met in niggardly and irregular
fashion, and much is left undone which might be done
to rob death of some of its terrors. The provision
of means to endow loved ones would soothe many
last hours. The extension of the State's activities
in these matters has not been fraught with perfect
results. Its failures suggest that it has neither the
genius nor the necessary moral quality for this kind
of work.

State activities are too costly, not only in the
cash sense, but in respect of time wasted and moral
fibre destroyed. The latter loss is appalling. This
is delicate ground, for it is customary to deny or
minimise the facts of pauperism. But the facts re-
main, and the tendency towards pauperism is more
manifest to-day than it has been in any other period
of Britain's history. This is not to be wondered at,
for whilst the old Poor Law marked definite lines
and provided local control, the Approved Society and
the Employment Exchange offer very obvious and
dangerous opportunities for the shirker.

Are there better ways of treating these expres-
sions of unrest than those at present in operation?

LABOUR UNREST 95

I believe there are. For unemployment, for super-
annuation, and for death, or what I would call post-
mortem liabilities, the industry appears to be a
better unit than the State. There are difficulties, but
none of them appear to be insurmountable, provided
employers and workers, through their central or-
ganisations, set aside preconceptions and adopt the
easiest methods of collecting funds, distributing bene-
fits, and preventing malingering; provided also that
each industry shall contribute each year, from any
surplus, a fixed percentage to an equalising pool.
Averages of unemployment, sickness, superannua-
tion, etc., would vary between trades, and even in
trades, between seasons, and the central reserve
upon which unfortunate industries might draw would
be a necessity.

To raise economically the necessary money it
would be advisable to abolish the existing system
of contributions, and substitute a percentage paid
each week by each employer upon the wages of each
worker, this percentage to be ascertained by actu-
aries, and quinquennially adjusted. It would then be
only necessary for the Trade Unions to collect the
contributions for trade purposes.

Those charges for sickness and unemployment are
at present nominally divided between the workman,
the employer, and the State. This is done in order
to conciliate interests, but it would be more eco-
nomical if, instead of the various threepences, six-
pences, and shillings paid in various ways, the em-
ployer paid the whole. A cheque could go into the

96 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

local bank to the credit of the industry, and the
workman's record card could be stamped with one
stamp for each week of employment; and, as at
present, his sickness and unemployment benefits
would be affected by the number of contributions
paid on his behalf.

Superannuation would be influenced by the num-
ber of weeks a man or woman was employed. I
should aim at one pound per week at fifty years
of age, with actuarial additions for each period of
five years until sixty-five was reached. For post-
mortem liabilities I would provide a fixed sum,
whether a person died after one month's employ-
ment, or after fifty years, it would be the same. In
no case would the individual have cause to complain.
The industry rather than the individual would di-
rectly meet the cost, and it might be that the earlier
deaths would leave greater dependency, that is, more
young children, aged parents, and others unable to
earn their own maintenance. It would not be al-
together desirable to scrap existing institutions; that
might be too costly. They could be remodelled
with the idea of reducing labour, eliminating profit,
and confining the Government's part to the advisory
and the provision of highly technical information.
Governments might guide, but not administer; pro-
vide statistics and actuaries, but not control.

The administration and control of finance should
be in the hands of a small commission of representa-
tive Trade Unionists and employers; the residuum

LABOUR UNREST 97

of need which these could not cover must be met by
the Boards of Guardians.

The more this question is studied, the more
definite is the conclusion that the State must go out
of these insurances against social and industrial
contingencies if honesty is to prevail. At the present
moment politicians promise improvements and ex-
tensions whenever an election is imminent. The
position is immoral to a degree, and it is difficult to
decide who is the greater criminal, the man who, for
his own ends, votes the public money, or the man
who takes it.

Can the industries bear the cost of insurance
against social accidents? They are bearing the cost
to-day, plus the cost of varied methods of collection
and administration. The foregoing suggestions in-
volve a revolution, but it is a revolution which lets
no blood and destroys no property. If such a system
were in vogue, the shirker could be dealt with as he
ought to be — that is, as a criminal. The decent
people — and they are still the majority — might
be expected to increase in efficiency and production.
Unrest would not be eliminated, but it could be
used to drive the social machine instead of to wreck
it.

Have we brains enough to give effect to such
ideas?

The answer is surely in the affirmative. We can
do these things, and in addition, build up new con-
ceptions. The one most needed at present is a
new conception of aristocracy. The highest classes

98 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

should be those who do most, and not those who
spend most; those who try hardest and not those
who lie hardest; those who set duties above rights,
and who view with greater regard their duty towards
their fellows than their prospects of acquiring power
or accumulating riches.

Unless our studies of unrest and its treatment
tend toward such a result, Britain cannot remain the
brains and heart of a great Empire, or even the
centre of a great Commonwealth.

There are some who seek to accentuate the less
desirable expressions of unrest on the assumption
that unrest is divine. It can only be divine when it
aims at divine things.

CHAPTER VII
STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES

NO one, least of all myself, desires to perpetu-
ate the bad that marred the industrial condi-
tions prevailing in pre-war days.

Hours were too long, wages were too low. The
conditions in which men and women worked were
often dangerous to life and health, and the condi-
tions under which they lived were frequently inferior
to those which were provided for cattle.

Nobody doubts that these conditions endangered
both the health of the worker and the life of the
State. Nobody suggests that they should continue.

Everyone agrees that change should take place.
The only difference is as to methods of effecting
change.

The majority desires to move steadily and on
constitutional lines; but the minority, made up for
the most part of men who have no knowledge of
competitive industry, and who never accept respon-
sibility for anything more important than words,
seeks, by any means, to precipitate social and poli-
tical disaster, in the hope that their own particular
theories and fortunes may be advanced.

Men of this type were behind the strikes in
Glasgow, in Belfast, in London and on the Tyne.

99

100 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Often they were defeated, but always they come back
again with fresh programmes for the bemusion of
the workers.

When these men have trumpeted, the Govern-
ment has retreated, and it has done this so frequently
that the extremists have been able to persuade their
followers that the Government feared them, and
would ultimately accede to their demands, no matter
how preposterous those demands might be.

These revolutionaries never consider the effect
of their activities upon the community as a whole,
nor do they appreciate the awful effects which their
perpetuation of uncertainty has upon British in-
dustry. They act as if the trades and the people of
this country were independent of each other and of
international considerations.

If they do understand anything of this country's
dependence on overseas trade for food supplies,
they hide or disregard their understanding. If they
can show that any increase in nominal wages tempo-
rarily follows their agitations, they still further se-
cure the allegiance of the ill-educated and unthinking.

To-day, one result of their efforts is the grave
endangering of Lancashire's export trade. The
cotton operatives look to the home markets to absorb
between 20 and 30 per cent, of their production.
India has hitherto taken about 40 per cent. The
balance goes to China, South America, the Levantine
and other parts of the world.

All these markets are equally open to Lancashire's
competitors. The extremists amongst the miners,

STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES 101

railwayman and postal employees may win tem-
porary advantage for their own people, but their
activities involve immediate, and in all probability
permanent, disadvantage for their fellow workers in
the cotton and other industries.

One of the most thoughtful of Lancashire's cotton
leaders declared sorrowfully that Lancashire trade
could not exist for twelve months unless export was
assured. How can export be assured under continual
disturbance in basic and essential trades? How can
export be assured in face of the soaring costs of
coal, of transport, and of communication?

Export is impossible apart from production, and
sale in overseas markets is equally impossible unless
the quality and price of the article submitted for
sale approximates to that of similar articles sub-
mitted by those nations who have been, and will be,
Britain's competitors.

It might be possible, by artificial restriction, to
prevent other people's goods from entering Great
Britain. It is not possible to prevent them entering
British Colonies or other once British markets; nor
is it possible to force highly-priced and low quality
British goods on any unwilling foreign market.

The unauthorised and synchronised strike destroys
national and international confidence, makes ordered
and remunerative production impossible. It dislo-
cates trade and creates suffering for most, and star-
vation for many.

It is extraordinary that, up to the present, the
promoters and supporters of unauthorised strikes

102 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

have been the same men who tried to provoke indus-
trial disturbances during the war. They are men
whose anti-British sympathies have been openly ex-
pressed.

During the war they constantly demanded peace
by negotiation. Now the war is over, and the need
for production is imperative, they flout peace and
make industrial war on every possible occasion.
That the workers they have led (or misled) might
have secured advantages by following more con-
stitutional methods is perfectly demonstrable.

The National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives
have never drawn a man out where negotiation and
settlement by reason was possible. All their disputes
have been settled in conference, and their increase
in wages, spread over a fair period, compare very
favourably with those secured by the men who have
adopted extreme courses.

The shoemaker was always a thinking person, and
during the war he acted with sensibility and fore-
thought. He has neither starved production nor
opposed the introduction of machinery, nor need-
lessly depleted the funds of his Trade Union.

It is of profound interest to the Trade Unionists
who have lent themselves to irresponsible movements
that they should consider the future as well as the
present effects of unauthorised or political (or, in-
deed, any) strikes. The older fellows, with some
experience of ordinary competitive conditions, will
do well to set their faces against the youngsters who
lack experience and the extremists whose objective

STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES 103

is political rather than industrial. They must think
hard over some problems of trade and commerce
for themselves, and resolutely refuse to be led into
the street merely for the purpose of destroying the
organisations which, through very difficult times,
have fought for better wages, hours and conditions.
A Trade Union shattered by foolish or criminal dis-
regard of altered conditions is the weakest kind of
reed to lean upon when times are bad. In any war
against society the members of such Unions must
themselves suffer, for they form part of society.

The miners have sacrificed industrial for political
objectives, but there have been others equally repre-
hensible. If the miners increase the cost of fuel, and
the railway workers the cost of transport, they
inevitably limit the markets in which their fellow
workers sell their productions, and ultimately de-
crease also the value of their own labour. The iron
and steel smelter, the engineer, the textile worker
and all those engaged in auxiliary or general work
suffer, and will continue to suffer grievously as a con-
sequence of the activities of those who get coal,
transport goods and men, and have charge of postal
or telegraphic communication. If these force uneco-
nomic rates and conditions, all the other workers
must work harder and longer for less money in order
to restore the balance. The extremists in these
trades have not only upset the new heaven and earth
conceptions, but they have jeopardised the eight-
hour day and many other ameliorations of old-time
conditions.

104 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

During this last fifty years the country has drawn
the majority of its comforts, as well as its foods,
from overseas trade. If the cost of fuel and trans-
portation and communication is materially increased,
greater effort instead of less will be necessary in
all other occupations, and in face of the competition
of other countries, to maintain the existing standard
of living. The pressing of wages beyond a certain
level is, in effect, like forcing too high a pressure
in a steam boiler. The engineer knows that a boiler
will safely carry a pressure of so many pounds
to the square inch. He knows that if he doubles
this ' pressure he does not double the power
capacity of the boiler. What he does is to blow the
boiler out of the window, and if poetic justice ob-
tains, he also goes out of the window with the boiler.
This very simple illustration represents an immu-
table law. There is no escape from it. When the
workman learns this lesson, he will have learned
something advantageous to himself and to the com-
munity.

Another effect of the extraordinary increase in
the price of coal will be to turn the attention of
scientists to some other form of fuel for power
and lighting purposes. It would be stupid for the
miners to imagine that there is no substitute for
coal.

General dissatisfaction, accentuated by loose talk
and strengthened by ignorance of the laws of ex-
change, or the influence of the selling price in over-
seas markets on the price of labour in England, is

STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES 105

mainly responsible for the success which attends the
efforts of strike makers. They have been helped,
too, by the fact that most of the young men now
employed have no experience of industry carried on
under normal conditions. They entered the work-
shops when the stress of war was at its greatest,
and when wages were paid without regard to the
economic value or the exchange value of the work
performed.

They cannot realise the abnormality of conditions
either during or following the war, and their per-
plexity and contumacy has been encouraged by the
weak, and frequently indiscreet, handling of succes-
sive problems by the Government. The Govern-
ment apparently thought that the best way to meet
demands was to hand out more money from bor-
rowed reserves. A better plan would have been to
face the situation fairly and squarely, and to tell the
people the real truth about production and wages.

Most men know that no one can manufacture at a
loss, and the only justification for Government inter-
ference would, therefore, be its willingness and
ability to make up loss by subsidy.

Subsidy has been the policy of the Government
for the past few years, and it is difficult for the very
ignorant to do other than regard its continuance as
necessary and easy. They cannot, or will not, differ-
entiate between political desideration and economic
values and necessities.

It is doubtful, indeed, whether many know or care
that the wages they received whilst engaged on muni-

106 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

tions were borrowed at high rates of interest, or
that the reasons which justified borrowing to pre-
serve national existence do not justify borrowing to
promote industrial laxity or national luxury. Even
if further borrowing is possible, it is certainly not
desirable.

The official leaders of the Trade Union move-
ment, as distinguished from the political, are deeply
anxious to secure for their men the just reward of
their labour, but they know that the reward cannot
continuously exceed the value of the articles pro-
duced, nor can these values be determined during
street riots or hooligan outbreaks.

The six-hour day may be an economic possibility,
but at present there are no facts from which men can
draw satisfactory conclusions. Such facts can only
accrue from experience, and meanwhile, there re-
mains the one great fact that wages must be paid
out of production. If six hours will not provide
sufficient to pay wages, wages will be cut down, or
more hours will be worked. It sounds brutal, but it
is sheer economic fact.

It may be exciting to rush history, but it is mostly
dangerous and always expensive.

Idleness does not beget happiness, nor is work
necessarily irksome, or injurious to health or mo-
rality. A man may provide for his own daily needs
in less than six hours, but he has duties towards
his family and towards that human residuum which,
through age or bodily infirmity, cannot provide for
itself. He must also make provision against sickness,

STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES 107

accidents, famine and the family difficulties that too
often follow the death of the mainstay.

The formula, uto everyone according to his
needs" is an impossibility apart from its corollary,
"from everyone according to his capacities."

How to obtain from each his maximum produc-
tion is a problem of eternity rather than time. For
ten thousand years autocrats, economists and soci-
ologists have variously regarded slavery, law and
selfishness as applicable incentives, but to-day the
contention of the sociologist appears to be upper-
most. The right to possess and accumulate provides
a greater inducement to effort than does knowledge
of law or fear of punishment. The tendency
(transient, of course) to appropriate for communal
uses the fruits of individual efforts, has already led
to dangerous slackening on the part of many capable
producers. They are electing to live upon capital
rather than earnings, and unless this inclination is
checked, there can be no real upraising of national
well-being.

The standard of living depends upon the standard
of production. If the latter is low, the former can-
not be high. The world abounds with proofs of the
fact that the nation which produces little, enjoys
little. If the miner refuses to produce coal, the poor
have no fires. If the railwaymen refuse to carry
goods, the poor have no food. What applies to the
miner and the railwaymen, applies equally, though
perhaps not so obviously, to the whole gamut of
human enterprises and affairs.

108 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Unfortunately, the continued intervention by the
Government in labour affairs has changed the char-
acter of the labour struggle. This has become poli-
tical instead of industrial. It is against the Govern-
ment, rather than against the employer, that the
present fights are waged. The employer is the ex-
cuse, not the objective, and it may require a hard
hand on the snaffle to bring labour back to the
sane path of economics, activity and development.

The immediate effects of all industrial disturb-
ances which have not as their basis real economic
advancement, will be higher prices for food, for
clothes, and every other thing the poor use. The
suffering will be accentuated by unemployment
beyond anything yet experienced, for if workmen
disregard contracts, the employers cannot contract
to produce goods, and the merchants cannot contract
to sell them, either in Britain or overseas.

This is as certain as that night follows day.
Apart from honest and continuous endeavour and
from honour in bargaining, there can be no confi-
dence, no enterprise; commerce will stagnate, em-
ployment will fail, and women and children will
starve.

In the preceding pages much has been said about
the need for the worker to give value for wages,
and it is now necessary to ask, "Has Capital done
all it can, and ought to do, for Labour?"

For all time, capital has, in its own opinion, ful-
filled its duty when it has paid the highest wages
labour could secure by individual or collective de-

STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES 109

mand. The conditions under which men have lived,
the standard of their education, the measure of their
daily anxieties, the depth of their suffering when old
age overtook them, these were not the concern of
capital.

There have been exceptions, but until recently,
these were only sufficient to emphasise the rule.

War was the precipitating influence, rather than
the cause, of present industrial troubles. War threw
lurid lights on the situation; it awoke dormant sensi-
bilities and aspirations. War set up a new caste,
those who, by courage, physique, and intelligence,
could accomplish things. Under the old conditions,
riches provided the main qualifications for social
standing; now they are only of secondary importance.
In the heroic ages it has always been the same; ele-
mentary capacities have counted. During the war,
literally hundreds of thousands of men were pro-
moted from the ranks because they possessed these
qualities. Many of these men are now in industry,
only to find that no real change has been effected;
that all the old problems exist; that national sub-
stance has been frittered away, and that their handi-
cap has been increased.

These men have been trained to smash military
obstacles ; they may want to smash the obstacles and
restraints imposed by parties and Governments.

The industrial and commercial problems of to-day
are too great for anything but collaborated effort.
Those who produce and those who direct have joint
responsibilities. If men would seek to deal with

110 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

labour, they must get to know it. Sentiment has
been outraged — and sentiment will fight. Every
slum, every premature death, every illiterate, every
thrifty soul whose wages were too low to enable
him to avoid indigence, every housewife whose in-
come is relatively less than before the war, will
struggle against the conditions that did obtain, and
that do obtain.

Are we going to oppose these struggles, or are
we going to assist them? Are we going to drive
sheep, or to lead men?

If we want to lead men, we must intelligently in-
terest them. They must see a common objective as
well as their employers' point of departure.

It is claimed that the socialisation of everything
will enable shorter hours to be worked and higher
wages to be paid. To advance this theory is to
ignore all history since Moses, and all experiences
of the past six years. During the war, Britain was
under a socialistic Government in the sense that the
Government controlled the land, the mines, the rail-
ways, and other means of production and distribu-
tion. It is perhaps justifiable to say that during
this period, not a soul in Great Britain, apart from
the official souls, has been satisfied with the efforts
of the Government. People had to purchase what
they were permitted to purchase, and pay the prices
fixed by Departments which were not always suc-
cessful in estimating values.

It is fair to say that no grade of society was
prepared for the war or for the circumstances which

STRIKES, WAGES AND VALUES 111

followed. The churches were less concerned with
the here than with the hereafter. Their ignorance
of life and death led them, and leads them, to
philander round phrases, and to seek salvation in
the dogmatic utterances of men, who, in spite of
cheaply achieved notoriety, are little more experi-
enced in economic law and fact than are those who
fill high places in the churches.

It became fashionable to talk of the "fog of war."
That was clarity compared with the fog which has
followed war. Everywhere men are seeking to dis-
cover ersatz solutions instead of those which history
and natural law alike suggest. So fanatical has be-
come the advocacy of ersatz apostles that anyone
who suggests the less ornamental, but more effective,
remedy of work, is called a traitor to his class.

It is asserted that the Government found eight
millions per day for the war, and that it can continue
providing for the circumstances that follow the war.
The fact that the Government did not find the
money, but borrowed it, does not appear to have any
weight, nor does the further fact that you cannot
borrow without credit, and that Britain's -credit is
so bad in America that we can only get 'less than
four dollars to the pound instead of a normal five,
while in Holland, it is something like i8|- instead
of 20 -.

If all men would sit down and write out what
it is that they really want; if they would also write
out how they hope to attain their desire, and whether
what they want is right and free from infringement

112 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

of the rights of other men, we should have gone a
long way towards achieving success. If all men
would realise that value is the whole basis of indus-
try; that nothing can be taken unless an equivalent is
given, half the ideas that create strikes and disturb-
ances would be killed instantly, and the other half
would cease to influence.

In our younger days we were taught that there
is no royal road to success. The writers of the copy-
book headings were wise men. If we would realise
that in industry and commerce the road is generally
difficult, and can only be traversed by those who have
strength and will power, and who are not afraid of
the burdens that accumulate as they pass along, then
we may hope for success.

CHAPTER VIII

WAGES AND METHODS

THAT war would disturb men's minds and judg-
ments was to be expected. Very few, however,
expected the aftermath to be so serious, or that men
would so completely mistake the shadow for the
substance.

One wonders whether the war is responsible al-
together for men's failure to estimate correctly both
material and moral values. For two hundred years,
Britain has been violently involved in, and with in-
dustry, and for fifty years, she has enjoyed whatever
advantages may be derived from a compulsory sys-
tem of education. If men make mistakes in reason-
ing and judgment, much of the blame must rest on
the shoulders of employers, who callously disre-
garded the human material they had to deal with,
and upon the system which gave the schoolmaster
his timetables and schedules and inspiration. Per-
haps, in these latter years, we have been altogether
wrong in our conceptions of life and education, and
instead of devoting most, or all, of our time towards
the cult of commercialism and the development of
intellectuality, we ought to have concentrated our
attention on improving physique and character and
the capacity for right thinking.

"3

114 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Unfortunately for the individual, and for the
nation, education has been too often the sport of
religious fanatics and of political parties. Each has
subordinated the interests of the child to the success
of its own particular schemes. Some of the parties
and factions have been perfectly honest in their opin-
ions. They have believed that their methods were
right, but the results, as one views them to-day, are
unsatisfactory and disconcerting.

If all men knew what was right, and were imbued
with the desire to do right, social and political prob-
lems would solve themselves with a minimum of
suffering and a minimum of bitterness. Men would
be able to distinguish the substance from the shadow,
and the real from the unreal. The objective of all
men's studies would be truth and fact — because they
would know for a certainty that only upon truth and
fact can happiness be based and communities exist.

All the mistakes made in Britain have their
counterparts in other countries. It is common to
hear people express their sense of thankfulness for
this commonality of error. This is a mistake. To
extend sorrow and trouble does not necessarily re-
lieve anybody, and it would be much better if we
were in a position to rejoice in the possession of
wisdom and in the knowledge that all nations were
with us and were moving definitely in the direction
of conclusions based upon understanding and right-
eousness.

Each country is demanding higher standards of
existence, and if each country understood what was

WAGES AND METHODS 115

right, higher standards might at once be brought
nearer. Unhappily, too many men expect to achieve
this higher standard without personal effort.

Thinking over these matters very long and very
carefully, has led to the conclusion that there can
be no definite advancement in material well-being
unless the value of all work performed is ascertained,
and all workers paid according to the value of the
product of their labours. I am quite aware that this
would mean something very different to the general
demand of to-day, which is for equal payment to all,
irrespective of the character or value of the work
performed. Under this system of payment by re-
sults, three men engaged on the same task, and work-
ing the same length of time, might be very differently
rewarded. Owing to natural aptitude or skill, one
man, in a given time, might produce three, four or
five units of value as against the other men's one.

However much modern thought may criticise such
a method of rewarding labour, it is obvious that the
advantages to the community would be greater than
those accruing under a system which encourages "ca'
canny," and which leads the mass of men to expect
rewards according to their requirements, rather than
their services. There can be no greater delusion
than the one which implies — by action, if not in
actual words — that the inefficient can be equally
rewarded without the efficient suffering. If men
want to enjoy greater happiness, they will have to
put forward more intelligent effort. All the talking
from Westminster to Glasgow cannot disprove this

116 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

contention, nor increase the weight or value of
corn, nor accelerate the revolutions at which a
machine may be driven, nor place the slates on the
roof of a single house.

Vague allusions to inefficient methods of distribu-
tion confuse without resolving the problem. It is
indeed absurd to expect a happy evolution of condi-
tions by merely changing the method of distribution.
Commodities must be produced before the distribu-
tor gets a chance of showing his skill. Questions of
fairness or unfairness in distribution are of pro-
found importance, but they are secondary in impor-
tance to the need for production.

Those who imagine that they can successfully re-
verse the order in which these two functions must
be performed are indeed chasing shadows.

Britain's position in the world depends mainly
in her external trade. The comfort and well-being
of many millions is determined by the buyer in for-
eign markets. The quantity of manufactured goods
sold, and the amounts paid for these goods, deter-
mine the standard of living and the real wages of
the people. Wage systems which offer relatively the
highest rewards for the lowest standards of effi-
ciency, or fiscal arrangements which affect the flow
of external trade, are of profound importance.

Some who are discussing trade, hope to improve it
by imposing arbitrary restrictions upon it; they pro-
pose to limit trade with alien countries; they hope
always to maintain national existence upon internal
effort and resources.

WAGES AND METHODS 117

Even a cursory glance at these proposals suggests
that, in addition to untoward results at home, they
might create unhappy situations abroad, and furnish
perpetual bases for international quarrels.

Is it wise to trail the commercial coat in the
dust, and constantly to invite retaliation? Can we
even persuade all our Allies that our efforts to
restrict trade in this particular way are directed
only against our late enemies? Instead of increas-
ing restrictions on trade, import or export, would it
not be better to remove those which already handicap
national effort and international understanding?

Our coinage and our systems of weights and
measures are a source of wonder to our friends
and of cynical amusement to our enemies. No one
understands them, and they could be amended with-
out hurting any nation's feelings or interests. These
weights and measures of ours cheat the home buyer
and arouse the suspicion of the foreigner. It is
doubtful whether, in the whole of Britain, in the
Government Departments, in the schools, or any-
where else, there is a single person who knows all
about the weights and measures which afflict us.
Nearly every county has special standards, and who
knows off-hand the difference between avoirdupois,
troy and apothecaries'? How many people even
know the difference in weight between a peck of pota-
toes and a peck of peas?

In Britain there is really no intelligible system.
Instead, we have an accumulation of methods which
permit the seller, who has studied his own particular

118 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

little lot, to trade unfairly with the buyer, who
cannot hope to acquire an intimate knowledge of all
the methods of swindling him. All these confusions
and difficulties affect trade. They influence external
more than intern*! trade. The foreign buyer might
be willing to pay the price if he could find out
what the price was, and what weight and measure
he would be entitled to receive. He is not inclined,
however, to pay the additional price of time wasted
and annoyance endured over the archaic methods of
a country he has no interest in beyond his business
interest.

Once, in France, I was working out a long-division
sum. A French friend, looking over my shoulder,
said : "You English are a wonderful people. Instead
of working from the left-hand top corner of a sheet
of paper to the right-hand bottom corner, as you
do, I should do this." He took a pencil to illustrate
his point, and on that portion of the paper which I
had not used, secured the result in an eighth of the
time, and with a very small use of material.

It would, of course, be difficult to persuade a peo-
ple so wedded to tradition and precedence as the
British are, to sweep away at one stroke all the
anomalies surrounding an antiquated system; but
there ought to be no serious objection to making a
beginning with the coinage. Already they have a
unit which has world-wide recognition, and which
lends itself to the decimal system. The sovereign
is universally known, and it can be divided in such
a manner as to meet all existing requirements.

WAGES AND METHODS 119

Some favour decimalisation, with the penny as a
unit, but there are trade and sentimental advantages
in retaining the sovereign. If the sovereign is re-
tained in its exact form, the other coins, providing
they make all the combinations necessary, are of less
importance than the adoption of the principle. Once
this is in operation, a very few years would suggest
all the alteration necessary to meet common conven-
ience.

Those who oppose the decimal system, say,
amongst other things, that it would confuse workmen
and cause them difficulty in fixing or calculating their
wages. Such a contention is an insult to working-
class intelligence and capacity. The many thousands
who have seen service in France, or in the Balkans,
or in Italy, must already be familiar with this system.
It is, indeed, even now common to hear sailors and
soldiers talking of francs and centimes, or kilometres
and kilogrammes, and one can frequently see that
they think in these terms. Any person who has
travelled knows how easy it is to handle and estimate
coinage based upon the decimal system.

There are trades which pay for piece work in
very small fractions of a penny, but on Saturday the
workman is paid in pounds and shillings, and not in
sixty-fourths. If he is intelligent enough to reduce
his sixty-fourths to pence and shillings, he would
surely find no difficulty in dividing by ten.

The Lancashire cotton market has already thrown
over the sixty-fourth, and now the points up and
down represent hundredths. Lancashire presumably

120 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

got tired of the struggle to harmonise the buyer's
measure of value with the seller's, and saved herself
trouble by adopting an instalment of an easier plan.
Engineers are everywhere duplicating the English
and the metric systems. Some of the Colonies al-
ready use decimals, and others are not inclined to
wait much longer for Great Britain's decision. It
will be very awkward indeed if, in Colonial business,
the Colonies operate one system and the mother
country another.

There may never come so favourable a time for
the change as at present. The war has upset most
conceptions of value; men who have served abroad
have acquired practical knowledge of the system
which is advocated; business relationships have been
transformed; and the adoption of the decimal system
now would cause less disturbance than might be
caused at some future date. To hesitate is to be
unready to meet the great need for industrial and
commercial readjustment, and it is not in the in-
terests of British trade that, in this particular mat-
ter, Britain should remain quiescent.

CHAPTER IX
HOUSING

THE facts of the Housing Problem are ob-
vious. The reasons which underlie the fact
remain obscured, partly because of the British ten-
dency to evade, rather than to investigate, and
partly because politicians, having made mistakes, are
unable, or afraid, to attempt admission and recti-
fication.

The position is so intolerable, however, that
neither national tendencies nor political susceptibili-
ties can be long considered. Platitudes and promises
and confiscatory theories fail to satisfy the returned
soldier seeking shelter, or the maternal instincts
of the woman who demands a home for herself and
the children she expects.

Why is there a shortage of houses? The more
frequently we ask ourselves and our political repre-
sentatives this question, and the more fearlessly we
face and investigate the answer, the sooner shall
we escape from our present deplorable position.

Thirty years ago there was no serious shortage.
Supply kept pace, at least approximately, with de-
mand. There were, indeed, thousands of houses to
let in different parts of the country at rents ranging
between three and six shillings per week. What

121

122 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

has happened? Why have tenants been offering
premiums to landlords, instead of landlords offering
inducements to tenants? Has there been any whole-
sale destruction ot houses, or any extraordinary in-
creases in the numbers of the people, or have social
and economic or political factors, separately or to-
gether, conspired to place a considerable portion of
the community in the position of the Son of Man,
who "had not where to lay His head" ?

In Britain there has been no such destruction of
houses as France and some other theatres of war
suffered, nor has there been any increase of popula-
tion beyond the ratios obtaining during the previous
hundred years. There has, admittedly, been a de-
sire for better houses, and a constant effort to secure
the demolition of houses of the back-to-back type,
but this has always been capable of regulation. It
becomes necessary, therefore, to look elsewhere for
causes of shortage and growing costs of provision.

There can be no intention anywhere of criticising
in a deprecatory fashion the desire for better houses.
It is commendable from every point of view.
Indeed, it is necessary to possess better houses if the
physical efficiency of the race is to be maintained, and
under the conditions which obtained thirty years ago,
it would have been possible to meet the desire for
improvement with very small additions to rents. One
shilling per week would have admitted the provision
of a convenient bathroom. Another shilling would
have provided a better fitted kitchen and an extra
bedroom. To-day, from ten shillings to one pound

HOUSING 123

or more must be added if such additional accommo-
dation is supplied.

It has been said that private enterprise has failed.
Would it not be more accurate to say that private
enterprise has been choked by the politicians who
believe that old methods must be discredited before
their own theories can be permitted to reach the ex-
perimental stages.

At one time it was suggested that the land question
was at the bottom of the housing situation, and be-
cause the public believed this they accepted the pro-
posal, tax land values.

Cost of land was not the serious obstacle to the
provision of houses that many people imagined. In
many provincial areas, having fairly large industrial
populations, the primary land cost need not have
been more than £20 per house, and this for houses
which met the needs of the people and satisfied hy-
gienic conditions. In this connection it should be
remembered that garden city theories do not meet
with universal approval, and are not necessarily more
healthy than the towns that are more compactly
planned. To be near one's work is the desirable
thing for most men, and it is not uncommon to hear
workmen condemn in unmeasured terms schemes
which involve long and tiresome and costly journeys
between the home and the workshop. It is the time
consumed in these journeys, and their money cost,
that lies behind many expressions of discontent. The
expenses attending the application of the garden city
plan are not confined to transit. Meals bought away

124 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

from home deplete the family exchequer, and where
the contributions to this have to be earned, every
extraneous demand is of grave importance. To
get home for meals and a good wash is the desire
of most workmen. It is the housewife's desire also.
She knows that it is not altogether a good thing for a
man to acquire the habit of feeding himself, and of
satisfying other social needs away from his own
home.

Those who have aimed at making pictures rather
than at satisfying needs have incurred grave respon-
sibilities, and their attempts to place the burden of
these responsibilities upon land costs, and land laws,
have intensified rather than diminished the com-
plexities of the situation.

The Act of 1909 was declared to be one of the
things that would free land and increase the possibili-
ties of building. It has done nothing of the kind.
Up to the enquiry which led to its emasculation, this
tax produced £4,100,000 at a cost of £4,600,000.
It had altogether failed to meet the intentions of its
sponsor, and it has been a potent factor in destroy-
ing that confidence without which houses cannot be
built.

Legislation in advance of possibility has led to
increases in the rates until it is not unusual for
these to be doubled, and instead of investors being
anxious to build small houses, they are now lending
their money to the Government, which is wasting
many thousands of pounds upon experiments and sub-

HOUSING 125

sidies which might have gone far to relieve the con-
gestions that exist.

To the student who is not handicapped by political
prejudices, it seems that the simplest way out of the
difficulty would be to let the investor feel once again
that there was a safe percentage of interest on his
money if he put it into small houses. It would be
cheaper and more expeditious than the amplification
of expensive Government Departments. Already
Commissions and Committees of Inquiry and the
Departments handling these matters must have cost
the country many millions of pounds, and so far they
can show very little indeed for their expenditure.

It is necessary, also, to face the problems arising
out of increased wages and decreased production.
The Labour Chairman of an Urban Council, charged
with the carrying out of a building scheme, has
found himself faced with the fact that a yard of
brickwork, which formerly cost 3^. 6d., now costs
four times that amount. A small Urban Council
which has advertised for tenders for the erection
of twenty-four cottages which were to be built within
a quarter of a mile of a railway station, which, in
its turn, is not more than twelve miles from where
bricks and cement are made, received one tender only
for eight cottages out of the twenty-four. The
builder, the only man who ventured to tender at all,
refused to accept responsibility for more. The price
tendered was £1,250 per cottage, with the proviso
that, in the event of labour troubles, higher wages,

126 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

or higher prices of materials, the local authority
should pay the additional charges !

The economic rent of houses built at this cost, on
money borrowed at six per cent., cannot be less than
£75 per year, plus rates and taxes and depreciation.
Workmen whose wages are governed by the condi-
tions of export trade cannot pay rentals of this kind.
The theorist lightly sets aside this difficulty by de-
manding that the State or the Municipality shall find
the balance. In effect, this means that the old houses
will bear the difference between the actual rent and
the rent that ought to be charged on the new houses.

Economic rent can be recovered only if houses
are economically built. None of the houses evolved
by the Government can ever be let at rents which the
workpeople can afford to pay out of wages. Those
who, in Whitehall, plan and muddle, those who, out-
side Whitehall, plead for subsidies before they can
build, and the workman who, while demanding the
best in the way of wages and of housing accommoda-
tion, fails to give of his best when on building work,
are all standing in the way of the common good.
Some of those concerned with building are inept;
some are actually dishonest. In either case, the
public debt is increased and the demand for houses
remains unsatisfied.

If the money spent on Departments and Inquiries
had been spent on building houses, there would have
tbeen happier additions to our cities, our towns, and
our villages. Nothing like the number of houses

HOUSING 127

promised has materialised, and the returned soldier
has to derive what comfort he can from the assur-
ance that, whilst he has no house to sleep in, the
Government has really sanctioned the plans for the
streets wherein his grandchildren may disport them-
selves.

Housing, like meat and coal, demonstrates the
Government's incapacity for dealing with businesses
that require personal initiative, rapid movement,
and economic administration. Throughout the
whole muddle the Government has acted like the
charlatan at the village fair. It has given or
promised palliatives that have no restorative effect
on the patient, who is represented in this instance by
the whole of the community. When it has muddled
a little longer, and involved the State in further
extraordinary expense, the Government may hark
back to causes, and may even develop the courage to
advise the removal of some of them, rather than to
continue the present unsatisfactory floundering about
after uneconomic remedies.

Meanwhile, small houses are liabilities rather than
assets. There are thousands of women and elderly
men who, by their own thrift or the thrift of those
who loved them, have become owners of small
property, and who would to-day gladly get rid of
those properties if it would be possible to sell them
at a price approximating to their original cost.

The very fact that these poor folk are unable to.
sell their properties and relieve themselves of State-

128 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

imposed liabilities demonstrates the need for
thorough investigation and for decisions that are
taken in the interest of the people rather than at
the instance of political theorists.

CHAPTER X
EDUCATION

STROLLING down the Boulevard St. Germain,
I first made acquaintance with the statue of
Danton. Camelinat, one-time Communist Minister
of the Mint, was my companion. Together we read
the inscription culled from the poet's own words:

"Apres le pain I' 'education
Est le premier besom du peuple"

After bread? Are we to-day really putting educa-
tion after, or is the tendency of the times to reverse
the logical sequence of effort and to put it before
bread?

A recent glance at the education programme and
the Estimates, and a comparison of these with the
Exchequer requirements, made me wonder. Can we,
under existing circumstances, afford, not merely the
cash expenditure, but also the loss of productive
capacity which the programme of the National
Union of Teachers and the Minister of Education
involves?

Are we putting education after bread?

It is a dreadful thing to limit opportunities for
education, but are we really offering equal opportu-
nities or are we trying to compel equal attainments?

129

130 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Have we forgotten the camel and the needle's eye?
If we have it might be wise to revive the story,
and to present it in slightly different form by assert-
ing that it is easier for a sinner to enter heaven than
for all children to pass through the same educational
aperture.

Education may permissibly become an obsession
with the Ministry in Whitehall. It may permissibly
become a business with the National Union of
Teachers. It most certainly ought to become a
business with the people of Britain. They have
the right to know the nature and the extent of the
aims of those who put forward policies and carry
legislation; they have the right to know what the
policies cost in terms of taxes, and how far they
will adversely influence the income and the comfort
of the home. It is essential, also, to know, at least
approximately, the extent to which educational fa-
cilities have been, and will be, taken advantage of.
It is unfair for enthusiasts to talk of advantages to
the children when they really mean positions for
the official.

It can be at once admitted that thousands of those
professionally interested in education are selflessly
sincere. They live and think for their children.
But — and the qualification applies to all professions
and occupations — there are others who set the pace
that will best accommodate their own interests.
Whether the nation is willing or able to go that
pace is sometimes a secondary concern.

The people should spend all they can afford on

EDUCATION 131

education. That goes without saying. But is it
wise for some of the people to add to the debts of
all the people by providing something that cannot
be assimilated?

If the finances of the country were flourishing; if
the people had a sufficiency of essentials, experiment
would be both justifiable and desirable; but can any-
one, laying claim to sanity, contend that the present
is the time for wasting money or for unwisely con-
tinuing children at school, who, for economic and
physiological reasons, might be happier in produc-
tive employment?

It is possible to ride a willing horse too hard, and
it is possible to provoke reaction by ignoring facts.

There are mutterings everywhere. Some feel
that, even in the profession, the mere imparting of
information is mistakenly assumed to represent
education. There are constant complaints, too,
against systems which place manual training on too
low a plane, and there is everywhere, not merely
criticism of, but fear at the failure to teach citizen-
ship and self-control. Unfortunately, examples of
these failures are more common amongst those who
have been at school since 1900 than they are amongst
those who, at that date, had left the schools and had
entered into business.

Self-education, too, has been almost superseded
by extraneous and subsidised assistance, and the
profession is sometimes blamed for this misfortune.
What has been explored and assimilated by one's

132 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

own brain continues in conscious effectiveness longer
than the superimposed lesson.

Self-education is at once the cheapest and most
valuable form, but to-day it has few advocates and
few devotees. Perhaps it is the prodigality and
inexperience with which facilities are provided that
breeds indifference.

If people are too young to work before they are
eighteen and too old to work after they are forty,
the productive period of their lives is going to be
very short as compared with their expectation of
life. How ordinary folk view the situation is clearly
shown by the complaint of a woman who said : "Oh,
yes ! Keep them at school till they are eighteen, see
them married at nineteen, and find that as they
marry your liabilities in respect of them increase
rather than decrease — but where do father and I
come in?"

It is said that education is the greatest asset that
a nation can have. For the moment I am not dis-
puting this contention, but I am constrained to
regard such an asset as I should regard a boiler
without a fire, or an engine without motive force.
It is only part of the equipment that a man or a
woman needs. Another, and a precedent part, is
health, and health is dependent on bread in the first
instance; and we are surrounding education with
conditions that make the maintenance of the bread
supply very difficult.

No one escapes the reiteration of the platitudinous
assertion that the State will provide. The State

EDUCATION 133

really provides nothing. It merely distributes a part
of what it has previously extracted from the pockets
of its members, or what it has borrowed on its mem-
bers' collective credit.

I have attended many education conferences, and
have been charmed and sometimes interested by
beautiful ideals expressed in eloquent language, but
to-day I know that ideals, to be realisable, must
have some association with common sense.

If the British received full value for the money
they spent on education they would be the best edu-
cated people in the world. Unfortunately, the pro-
foundly important work of training the young has
been left too much in the hands of the bureaucrat
and the professional. We have, in consequence, a
people possessing superficial smatterings, but little
love of knowledge for its own sake, a people who
know little about themselves or the facts that govern
life.

This is a grave disadvantage, because a people
trained in the study of their own physical and mental
capacities, and with reasonably clear ideas concern-
ing the factors that govern their social and political
existences, must take precedence over the nations less
efficiently trained.

Existence is governed by laws we do not make,
and cannot amend, and which we only imperfectly
understand. We speak loosely of these laws as
natural laws, but so badly do we apprehend them
and their irresistibility that we often lightheartedly

134 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

disregard them, and are pitifully astonished when
the inevitable penalties are exacted.

The common tendency is to place blame for penal-
ties on every set of circumstances except the right
one. Generally we blame the Government for our
troubles, and we create more governments to cure
them. We rarely admit that most of our troubles
are due to individual ignorances.

Had each of us known as much as we ought to
have known about physique and mentality, there
would have been no need to discourse eloquently
upon the dangers of a C 3 population. Had we
known as much about the laws that govern our social
existences as we ought to have known, the present
industrial and commercial situation would have
developed less dangerously.

The masses of the people ought to have been able
to differentiate between actual and nominal values;
between the real and the unreal; but even amongst
those who have passed through the superior schools,
and who would be offended if it were suggested that
they lacked education, there is a lamentable lack of
knowledge or understanding concerning vital things.

What we have, we must endure. Attempts effec-
tively to change and improve the passing generation
will have disappointing results. The coming gen-
eration, however, may be helped, and there are wise
men who are desirous of helping the young by first
training the teachers of the young in the matters
that are vital to human interests.

The pressure of after-war problems will compel

EDUCATION 135

the Trade Unionists and others to readjust their
thoughts and ideas, and it may well be that they
will begin with the schools.

During the last fifty years, changes in the methods
of production, combined with competitive demands,
have destroyed in almost every occupation the old-
fashioned system of apprenticeship. The employer
is no longer under an obligation to teach the princi-
ples and practices of trades, nor is the boy com-
pelled to remain at one occupation for the number
of years necessary to turn him into a skilled work-
man. It is no use bewailing the change, or assuming
that it is altogether for the bad. Change, or at
least movement, is essential to the continuance of
things; change is prejudicial mainly when those
affected by it lack the sense of appreciation and the
quality of adaptability.

If in the majority of occupations the responsibility
of teaching has passed from the employer, it is
imperative that this responsibility should be assumed
by the State through its schools.

The trained workman is an asset to the commu-
nity, and upon the community should rest the burden
of the cost of his training. A share of this should
be placed upon the local authorities, and arrange-
ments for training should not be permissive but
obligatory. Experience proves that where schemes
are wholly permissive, the advanced and patriotic
authority bears an unfair share of the cost of train-
ing whereby the whole community benefits.

It is often alleged that the chief obstacles of

136 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

efficient industrial training are those raised by the
Trade Unions. Twenty years ago, there was some
truth in this allegation; but to-day the Unions are
recognising the value of the trained man, not only
to the State, but to their own movement. It becomes
increasingly obvious to them that the inefficient or
the ill-trained are the most readily exploited. The
man who is sure of himself and confident in his
ability to perform the task he undertakes is in an
infinitely better position than the man who is con-
scious of inferiority, and who is always afraid to
attempt new processes.

Throughout the Trade Union movement there is,
to-day, a growing unanimity in favour of raising the
school age. This tendency can only be justified if
the curriculum becomes less academic, and all con-
cerned concentrate upon making the school an ante-
room in which lives are prepared for the world's
more strenuous and wider functions.

Up to the present, the schools of Great Britain
have not become the centres of local life; yet this
is just what they ought to be.

In some schools, particularly in America, where
social experiments are received with greater toler-
ance than is accorded them here, the school has
become, to a very great extent, the centre of the
community; its playgrounds, its baths, its gymna-
sium, and even the school itself being used by the
parents as well as by the children. In these schools,
what is termed "vocational training" forms an
integral part of the curriculum. They enlist the

EDUCATION 137

co-operation of the Trade Unionists, and all the
trade instructors are members of their respective
organisations.

In these American schools, the manual training
prior to the age of 16 is largely for general edu-
cative purposes, and much of it is given in the purely
elementary schools. It is desirable that this prac-
tice should be developed, or that the elementary and
the secondary school should be more frequently
organised under the same roof. If such were the
case, many more pupils would pass through from the
elementary to the secondary school. The transfer-
ence from one school to another, the breaking of old
associations and ideas, disturbs the child's life, and
in too many cases, involves the parents in unwise,
and often unnecessary, expenditure.

I have seen the struggles of the parents to provide
the boy who has won his way into the secondary
school (and of whom they are very proud) with
the things which the Governors of the secondary
schools sometimes regard as necessities — football
shoes, cricket flannels, etc. These contributions for
sports and games are beloved by the teacher, and
without them, the boy feels very unhappy; but when
they are obtained at the expense of the other chil-
dren in the family, they are very undesirable.

If the relationship between the elementary and
the secondary school could be closer, if the break
between old associations and new ones were not so
great; if the boy could occasionally come into touch
with his old companions and under the influence of

138 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

his old master, there would be less of the restlesness
which leads him to desire immediate industrial occu-
pation rather than secondary training.

There are many men engaged in the social move-
ment who are giving time and thought to the admin-
istration of national education. Most of them are
prepared in the truest sense to make the schools
national assets. Hitherto, they have lacked the
effective support of those in whose interests they
have been labouring.

The competitive problems with which the country
is faced are such that serious suffering and loss will
result, unless the best is made of all its assets.
Even those who fear the undue influence of the mere
bookman, admit that the human asset is the most
important of all.

The losses and extravagances of the past seven
years must restrict immediate educational efforts.
Only that which will assist the present and the immi-
nent future can be attempted. Foundations will be
more the national concern than superstructures, but
there is no reason why the foundations should be
bad. Economy and practicability must be the watch-
words of those who would educate the people, but
who are reluctantly compelled to put existence
before adornment; bread before erudition.

As I study the programmes of to-day, and their
probable cost to the community, I wonder whether
Danton smiles down upon us sorrowfully or sar-
castically, and I seem to hear his spirit muttering,
"Apres le pain. . . ."

WAR AND ARMIES

THERE should no longer be any illusions con-
cerning war. It is stupid, barbarous, illogical,
and wasteful. It arrests artistic progress, impedes
the development of civilisation, and destroys a very
high percentage of the virile and highly moral man-
hood of those nations which are involved. All the
advantages that militarists declare are achieved by
war can be achieved by other means and with far
less expenditure of effort and money, and with infi-
nitely less suffering for the people whose homesteads
are overrun and destroyed.

The figures relating to the cost of war are beyond
the computation of men; it is said that the Allies in
the late war spent two thousand million pounds
sterling by the time the war had been in operation
twelve months. These figures, stretched across a
placard, look imposing and create an impression of
dizziness, but never of apprehension. Even the
intelligent business man failed utterly to understand
what two thousand millions really meant, or what
science and art and civilisation could accomplish for
the world if two thousand millions were set aside for
this purpose.

139

140 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

The ghastliness of modern war has not yet been
depicted. Governments have, everywhere, hidden
from the sight of the world the misery and filth and
pain and terror endured by those who, having no
personal animosity, are forced to maim and slay.
The people may cheer the pomp and pageantry of
war; the observant may see the little groups of
women at the street corners, quietly crying over the
letters that notify of the death or the maiming of
those who are dear to them; they may shake their
heads in sympathy when they look upon the groups
of children who are fatherless, but they see nothing
of the more horrible facts of war, or if they see,
see only incompletely and as through a mist.

If they knew and understood the actual facts,
together with the cost, there would be no more war
in those nations which call themselves civilised, and
which have any capacity for expressing the demo-
cratic will.

Militarists and their apologists frequently talk
of the moral effects of war, though they seldom
attempt to define their conceptions of morality as
applied to war. Morality has been roughly defined
as the science of right living, and when militarists
exalt the war god, one is inclined to ask how they
associate pillage, rapine, and murder with morality
of any kind.

It has been contended that war would never again
offer such examples of savagery as those which sully
the pages of history. The late war has swept all
such contentions aside, and has demonstrated the

WAR AND ARMIES 141

possibility of horror being piled upon horror even
by nations who boastfully claim possession of the
highest forms of modern culture.

As in the days of Atilla, unoffending villages have
been razed, helpless non-combatants outraged and
murdered, and artistic monuments swept to the
ground in one mass of fire and destruction. No
influence, not even the religious influence, has been
strong enough to restrain that barbarism which war
always involves.

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," and
sufficient for our time is the evil wrought by one
war. As in the past, so it was in the late war; so
it will be in the future wars; every ideal abased,
every business enterprise checked, every fraternal
conception swept aside, and the world made poorer
in wealth, in spirit, and in aspiration.

War is essentially the expression of ignorance and
avarice, and of those who promote war, nothing but
evil may be anticipated. Amongst those who actually
make war, there has, however, during centuries of
conflict, arisen certain standards of honour and con-
duct, and because their acceptance might mitigate
the sufferings of neutrals and non-combatants,
various Hague conventions have sought to crystallise
these standards.

During the late war we had, unfortunately, to
see these carefully elaborated codes and standards
swept aside, sacred obligations and treaties con-
temptuously ignored, and a ghastly "frightfulness"
increased. Fear everywhere was more acutely felt,

WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

and organised outrage, alike unreasonable and inde-
fensible, was the natural result.

The loss of life and property does not complete
the sacrifice. Dearest liberties of thought, expres-
sion, and movement are abrogated; not merely
during hostilities, but afterwards and always.

Savagery and civilisation have always reacted
upon each other, and will continue so to react. The
higher forms of civilisation must, unfortunately,
continue to defend themselves against the lower.
National ambitions and the desires for territorial
and industrial aggrandisement may be stupidly
wicked, but they exist.

Jean Block had many adherents when he argued
that war's frightfulness would end war. The
museum at Lucerne, which was devoted to illustra-
tions of war's machinery and effects, led thousands
of tourists to hope that horror would be an effective
deterrent. Block may be right; the adherents and
tourists may be justified in their opinions — but not
yet.

The war just waged excelled all other wars for
destructive frightfulness and ghastly bestiality, but
it did not usher in the end of world war. The moral
sense of the world has yet to grow and to attain
international and interracial approximation, while
the power and understanding of the masses must
be greater and more intelligently applied, before
such a consummation can be reached.

We can never even go back — at least, not with
safety — to the old army constitution and construe-

WAR AND ARMIES 143

tion. Change is inevitable, increase probable. There
were people who believed that at the end of the late
war, formulae would be invented which would make
future war impossible. Such people ignore the
teachings of history and the differing grades of
contemporaneous civilisation. It is nearly 2,000
years since Christ preached peace on earth. In the
light of existing and immediately proximate events,
can any man say how far this preaching has been
effective, and when the ideal He set up will be
attained?

Even America has already translated the lessons
of the late war into additions to her army and navy.
The millennium may come ; all men may live together
as brethren; peaceful tendencies may develop in
accelerating ratios, but humanity has many morasses
to cross before this goal is reached.

If this be the case, if we are to retain larger
armies and navies, we should now be considering
their construction and control and the part to be
allotted to democracy.

It is the habit of Labour, even highly organised
Labour, to discuss effects rather than to anticipate
them. It will rail against the bias of Capital and
the ineptitude of Government Departments, but its
opponents are calculating upon Labour's failure to
combine its resources for the purpose of reorgan-
ising, not merely the structure, but the outlook of
those Departments.

Labour, as distinguished from the political
adventurers who strut upon Labour's stage, ought

WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

to disappoint its opponents by turning from inter-
esting, but unessential, point, of demarcation and
internal co-ordination to the co-ordination of its own
strength and the contemplation, not of impossible
ideals, but of practical utilities.

The lessons of history, the duties of citizenship,
the art of government, the obligations and commit-
ments of Empire, are subjects well within the intel-
lectual capacity of thousands of the lower-paid
inhabitants of Britain. What these thousands lack
is self-confidence and educative inclination. The
former will come with experience, and the latter by
the wise exercise of already existing opportunities.

There is no position in the civil, the colonial, or
the foreign services, or in the navy and army, to
which the poorest citizen ought not to aspire. The
fact that he has hitherto been excluded from the
higher grades of these services offers no justification
for his continued exclusion, yet to suggest that the
Trade Unions should have a representative on the
Army Council would probably stagger the Labour
movement as much as it would shock the Army
Council.

But why not? Labour, in the very nature of
things, finds ninety per cent, of the blood and sinew
of the army; it makes the equipment and munitions,
and it is mainly responsible for the creation of those
financial resources without which armies are impo-
tent, and, with equal training, it could hardly make
more mistakes than are made by the classes which
have hitherto monopolised control, and if the con-

WAR AND ARMIES 145

dition of its representation was the promotion of
military efficiency and moral, no possible harm could
accrue.

It is safe to assume that the British army of the
future will be larger than that little band of heroes
who sought to stem the German rush through
Flanders. It will probably be built on a territorial
basis, and efforts will certainly be made in the future,
as they have been made in the past, to introduce
permanent compulsory service. Equity and policy
demand alike that in this country Labour shall not
only serve, but shall have opportunities of directing
and leading, not only in the Territorial Forces, but
at headquarters and in the field.

One of the finest soldiers in the armies of the
late war was a workman's son. He was quite young,
a great scholar, a good soldier and a modest gentle-
man, but nothing short of a miracle could place him
on the Headquarters Staff. A thousand traditions
and a thousand interests opposed him. No one
argues that this should be, but everyone knows it is.
The interests of Empire demand extraordinary
changes ; the competitive demands of to-morrow can
only be met by the utilisation of the best brains and
the most virile constitutions. An army will, at least
for many generations, remain an adjunct of every
sovereign state, and the British army must be organ-
ised on a basis which gives the best opportunities to
the best men.

All men should serve a period in the ranks.
Aptitude displayed should be noted and developed,

146 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

and promotion should depend upon capacity and
devotion to duty as well as upon scholastic achieve-
ments. It follows as a natural consequence that pay,
at least for the lower grades, must be adequate, and
the private, no matter what arm of the Service he
serves with, must start with a good basic rate.

It has been said that our Expeditionary Force was
little but good. None of us want a great standing
army, but all of us must realise that the smaller the
army, the better it must be.

Open the ranks, offer opportunities, pay a reason-
able wage, give all the people a chance to participate
in its construction and leadership, and it will be
possible to create an army second to none, willing
to fight, willing to die if need be, anyhow, at any
time, and in any place, for the Homeland, for its
Dominions, for its Dependencies, or for its honour.

CHAPTER XII

THE SOLDIER AND LABOUR

FROM the earliest days when nation went to war
against nation, the problem of the discharged
and disabled man has been growing in gravity.
When most men worked on the land and were, in
addition, parts of a feudal system, the problem was
less intense than it is to-day, when millions of men
have been withdrawn from industry to be killed,
or maimed, or to find on return that the course of
industry has changed, and their value, outside the
army, is considerably less than it was before they
took to soldiering. The Peninsular War, the
Crimean War, and the South African War, each
saw the accentuation of the difficulties facing the
soldier who had been an industrialist. After the
South African War we frequently said, "Never
again." Never again would we permit the man who
had fought for his country to be subjected to per-
petual handicaps in the world of labour. When
Germany, in 1914, plunged the whole world into
war, and we in Britain endeavoured to augment our
armies by voluntary means, we repeated the good
resolutions and the promises that had been adopted
by our fathers and grandfathers in previous wars.
We said that the workman who left his job at the

J47

148 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

call of country, who offered his life that the
integrity of his country might remain intact, should
not suffer as his predecessors had suffered. If he
sacrificed in order that the men who were too old to
fight or too feeble to fight, and the women and
children whose business was not to fight, should
escape the horrors that accompany invasion, then
all would unite to secure his future, should he be
fortunate enough to return.

We loaded our patriotic speeches with references
to the manner in which we ought to perform our
duties to those who returned broken from the wars,
and it was felt that the spiritual awakening resulting
from the war would enable all national interests to
unite in safeguarding the soldiers' interests. Long
before the war had finished, it became evident that
selfishness would predominate; that those who had
remained at home, either through infirmity or
because of interest, would seek to hold fast to all
the advantages that unexampled opportunity and a
restricted labour market had given them. Employ-
ers said : "We are exceedingly sorry for the disabled
man. We think he ought to be offered every oppor-
tunity for re-association with industry; but, unfor-
tunately, our industry is entirely unsuitable for the
disabled man. He ought to go over the way, and
seek employment in the workshops of our competi-
tors."

The surprised and harassed soldier turned then to
his fellow workmen, in only too many cases to be
met with the same contention. "Yes, you ought to

THE SOLDIER AND LABOUR 149

be found employment, or, if you cannot be found
employment, the State must take care of you, your
children, and your interests. Unfortunately, our
Trade Union, or our trade, already has one or two
per cent, of unemployment, and we cannot make
room for you. You have our best wishes, however,
and we hope some other trade, about which you
know nothing, may be able to absorb you. If this
is found to be impossible, we will pass resolutions
demanding sustenance from Parliament."

Not everywhere has this spirit been manifested.
There have been many and notable exceptions, but
it is impossible to deny the tendency in some direc-
t: ~>ns not to meet the position of the discharged and
disabled soldier.

The assumption of the mass, that the passing of
resolutions demanding support from Parliament
meets the case, is entirely unjustifiable. It cannot
be too clearly stated to the workman that he has
got to work with the ill-trained and the disabled,
or work for them. He can either assist them to
employment, or he can increase his own production
till it is sufficient to keep himself and the man
returned from the war. Nor can it be too strongly
stated to the employer that, unless he makes
arrangements for employment and the payment of
reasonable wages, he will have to pay additional
taxes.

The problem is admittedly bristling with difficul-
ties. It can be better solved round the conference
table than on the platform. There are questions

150 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

affecting the value of the labour that the disabled
can give ; the extent to which the pension may affect
wages; the extent to which the inclusion of the dis-
abled may reduce the collective value of output; and
the additional liability that may fall upon the
employer in respect of sickness and accident.

Up to the present, there has been no decision as
to whether the pension given to a soldier is given
in respect of services rendered, or in respect of
liabilities incurred. If it has been given in respect
of services already rendered, there can be no taking
it into consideration when estimating wages. If, on
the other hand, it is given in respect of disabilities
incurred, then it may be argued that the pension
should be taken into consideration when attempts are
being made to determine the wage value of the
disabled.

If the country was rolling in wealth, if its
standards of production had developed instead of
deteriorated as a consequence of the war, if the
Chancellor of the Exchequer found no difficulty in
making the national income meet the national ex-
penditure, the whole matter could be dismissed
lightly; but in face of the circumstances that exist,
it may be necessary for the soldier to remember
that he is also a citizen, and that whatever tends to
overweight or disrupt the Empire, tends to destroy
his chances of getting any recompense at all. From
a bankrupt nation he can obtain neither employment
nor pension. Rhetoric will not solve his problem.

THE SOLDIER AND LABOUR 151

Hard — very hard — and unpleasant facts may have
to be faced.

The Government, struggling with difficulties, bur-
dened by promises, made probably in perfect good
faith, has endeavoured to meet the situation. First
it hoped, as every decent man and woman hoped,
that mutual arrangements between associations of
employers and associations of employed would them-
selves seek the industrial salvation of the demo-
bilised and the disabled. When many derelicts were
left, it was compelled to move, but it is difficult to see
how the Government itself can solve the problem.
It will not be easy to give effect to any regulations
it may make, because some occupations lend them-
selves to absorption, others do not. Some groups
have distinguished themselves by generosity, others
by selfishness. It will be hard to force men into
unsatisfactory occupations, or to further impinge on
the good will of those who have already tried to do
their duty in this matter.

However great the difficulty, it must be overcome.
The men have taken the risks ; the vast majority of
them are really decent fellows, who prefer to earn
their corn. They hate anything in the shape of
pauperism, and they don't differentiate between the
pauperism of the Board of Guardians and the pau-
perism of the Labour Exchange. They would like
to work, not only because work would enable them
to keep themselves and to maintain their self-respect
and dignity, but because it is impossible to be happy
without work of some sort.

152 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

In employment they may forget, or at least
remember with less poignancy, malformation and
disfigurement that so many of them suffer.

Is it too late for this task of honour to be per-
formed without the compulsion of the State? Is
it too late to avoid the inclusion, amongst other
burdens, of the inefficiency and expense of a State
Department for the control of the employment of
the disabled?

For my own part, I would a thousand times rather
that Capital and Labour should frankly shoulder the
debt they owe, and seek themselves to liquidate it,
without the compulsion of the State, for the State's
methods are always costly, and too frequently they
are also demoralising.

Just as the soldier looked towards the time when
his life would no longer be controlled by the King's
Regulations, the civilian is looking for the restora-
tion of those civil liberties which he never properly
appreciated till they were seriously circumscribed.

During the war the State, of necessity, invaded
the spheres of life which, in normal times, are
rightly regarded as being outside its functions. It
exercised the right, when threatened by grave mili-
tary danger, to use and sacrifice the lives of its
members. It laid its iron hand upon those who
remained in civil occupations, directing them hither
and thither, often against their real inclinations, in
the hope of extracting maximum production. Em-
ployers were compelled to close, curtail or reorganise
their respective businesses, while workpeople were

THE SOLDIER AND LABOUR 153

compelled to register at exchanges they detested,
to work at specified tasks in specified localities, and
for specified employers.

During a crisis like the nation was then passing
through, only a fool or a traitor would make much
ado about measures taken for the national safety
or defence. Any attempt, however, to perpetuate
such a control of human effort and affairs, and to
continue such restrictions of liberty after the war,
will be resisted, and men who supported whatever
the Government did in a time of common danger
will be found leading common upheavals against
bureaucratic control.

Social science is not, like mathematics, an exact
science. The deepest student may find the most
carefully calculated prediction incontinently upset;
but amongst a nation so temperamentally individu-
alistic as the British, he may safely count upon most
violent reactions from bureaucracy.

During the war the State interfered extensively
with Labour. The result has been to transfer
Labour antagonism from the Capitalist to the State.
Strikes, which in pre-war days were purely anti-
Capital, have now become anti-Government. The
State, having partially superseded the private em-
ployer, Labour, when it fights, must perforce fight
with the State, until all things are once more nor-
mal. The ultimate and logical outcome of such a
situation is too obvious to need statement.

The world hardly appreciated the extent of the
State's incursions into the affairs of labour, or the

154 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

vitiating effects of these incursions on the spirit and
power of the Trade Unions. The State professes to
provide situations for the unemployed; to supply
sickness and medical benefits; usually at a cost many
times greater than that of the Unions handling simi-
lar business; it pays unemployment benefit; it also
intervenes in disputes and fixes wages.

What is there left for the Unions to do? Why
should any man belong to one which advertises its
intention to proceed on the old non-political and
non-religious lines? Why should he pay contribu-
tions to provide service and benefits which the State
offers for nothing? Why should he be bound by
rules and agreements, or follow any Trade Union
leader, if his interests or inclinations, or some self-
seeking politician suggests other courses? Why,
indeed?

As with Trade Unions, so it was with those who
directed industry or commerce. So long as the
Government orders and controls the Government
also pays, and pays in cash and destroyed initiative.
During the war, the costliness of operations was lost
sight of in the multitude of other considerations.
To-day it has become obvious, and the fight for
economy and efficiency is sometimes obscuring the
national duty to the returned soldiers.

It is unreasonable to expect the highest and
greatest successes in businesses controlled or adjusted
by Government. They are much more likely to be
found in concerns where the losses fall on those who

THE SOLDIER AND LABOUR 155

make mistakes. If the head of a private business
errs in judgment or in action, the penalty falls upon
himself or upon his shareholders. If an executive
officer of a business run by the State makes a mis-
take, the State pays and the officer continues to
qualify for his pension.

There is, as a matter of experience and necessity,
less initiative and enterprise in Government concerns
than in private ones. The former is tempted to
wait for political measures; it is the safer course.
The latter must anticipate and act in order to succeed
against the world's competition.

When the war ended, Great Britain was one
nation amongst many whose wits and practices had
been sharpened by grim circumstance. All the
nations were faced with the need for production
and facile exchange. The least adaptable was in
danger of suffering most. In such a situation, it was
essential that the industrial and commercial enter-
prise of the British should have the freest possible
scope. Governments can create commercial oppor-
tunities, but they invite jobbery and failure when
they seek to exploit them.

Difficulty and complexity must not appal those
who are determined to set Britain free of her obli-
gations to her ex-service men and the bureaucratic
control of her affairs. The disabled must be assisted
to maintain themselves, and the able demobilised
must be allowed to share whatever employment they
are fitted for. Industry and commerce and men

156 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

must get free of Government interference, if the
people are to recover balanced conceptions concern-
ing obligations and wages and profits and national
prosperity.

CHAPTER XIII

SYNDICALISM

TO-DAY, it is difficult for even the initiated to
discover the operative differences between
trade unionism, syndicalism, communism and social-
ism. The revolutionary alchemist has been at
work, but instead of transmuting the baser into the
finer, he has adopted exactly the opposite policy.
Some men profess adherence to all four forms of
social activity, and associate themselves with the
propaganda of each group, and that, despite the
impossibility of finding agreement between funda-
mental factors.

Trade Unionism itself is a phase of capitalism.
Together they stand or fall, as parts of the same
system. The end of the capitalist involves the end
of the trade unionist. The latter has no probability
of existence if the former dies. Trade Unionism
came into existence to remedy the evils of capitalism,
and if capitalism is destroyed, there will be no more
incidental evils to remedy, and no trade unions will
be needed. The revolutionary government of
Russia has, apparently, accepted the logic of this
contention, for it has treated the real trade unionist
almost as savagely as it treated the capitalist. The
moment trade unionists begin to reason logically,

158 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

they will discover how fundamentally they differ
from the other "isms," particularly syndicalism.

Socialism, at least in theory, stands for the State,
and subordinates the rights of individuals to those
of the community. It would, again in theory, pro-
vide work for all and compel all to work, not for
the pleasure or the profit of the worker himself,
but for the benefit of the State.

Syndicalism differs from both, and may be de-
scribed as the "All for us" movement as applied to
production. The workers in given industries are to
own and control the sources, the materials, the tools,
the products, the distribution, the profits and the
losses. Not for the common good, be it marked,
but for the particular good of those engaged in the
particular occupation. The mines for the miners;
the railways for the railwaymen; the bricks for the
brickmakers, and the beer for the brewers, are
superficially attractive contentions. Materialised
and put into practice, these contentions would effect
results in which the absurd and the tragic struggle
for predominance.

Syndicalism, as generally advocated, implies the
right of the individual or the group to cease work at
any time, or under any circumstances, and at any
cost to the individual, the trade union, or the com-
munity. It has been hailed as the new gospel and
the source and realisation of social salvation. Its
devotees openly advocate sabotage, or the destruc-
tion of working tools, raw materials, private prop-
erty and commercial opportunities. There is noth-

SYNDICALISM 159

ing new about its conceptions or about the methods
of its present-day adherents. Its main weapon,
sabotage, was once called rattening. Rattening,
which was rampant in Britain about a hundred years
ago, differed from sabotage in that it had no con-
sciously political objective. It was discarded by our
great-grandfathers because they found it to be more
expensive and less effective than other and more
intelligent forms of trade union activity. The con-
cession of the right to combine, together with the
removal of many legal disabilities, opened up new
and better ways, and the complete reversion to obso-
lete localism which sabotage and syndicalism em-
body, has become impossible in communities which
do any thinking.

It is claimed that syndicalism would remove
every social disability, and it proposes to achieve this
result by temporarily disregarding human needs and
by utterly disregarding industrial contracts and by
promoting strikes. Whether these strikes are of
long or short duration is of minor importance. The
desirable thing, from the point of view of their
organisers, is to make them general, and to arrest,
or at least endanger, anything in the shape of con-
tinuous industrial enterprise. They rely for the
success of their strike activity at worst upon fear,
and at best upon aimless and irresponsible enthusi-
asm. The last thing these wild men give credit to,
is experienced sagacity.

Contracts, industrial or otherwise, impose obliga-
tions, embody advantages and disadvantages, privi-

160 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

leges and duties. The obligations involved are
supposed to be mutual and equal, but admittedly
they are not necessarily so, and where the balance
of mutuality is not equal, or where conditions of
unanticipated irksomeness develop, there always
arises the question of whether the contract should
be completed or fully observed, or whether some
modification should be sought. To preach disregard
of all industrial contracts and agreements is, how-
ever, to preach very dangerous doctrine and to call
down upon the general population consequences —
dissimilar in character perhaps, but fully as evil —
as those involved even in the keeping of the bad
bargains.

Disregard of agreements must, of necessity, cause
loss of confidence and credit. It should never be
forgotten that Britain depends for her safety upon
confidence and credit, as well as upon her Navy and
Army. Any dislocation of her industry must react
upon her credit by compelling her to exchange
securities held in other countries for commodities
which, apart from industrial dislocation, she could
produce for herself. Confidence and credit are
primary factors, without which organised produc-
tion and commerce are impossible. Disregard of
industrial agreements must tend to increase the ratio
of unemployment, and accentuate the possibility of
ultimate industrial and commercial disaster.

Ethical considerations may sometimes demand
the repudiation of agreements; for example, where
one side has benefited by gross misrepresentation

SYNDICALISM 161

of facts; but political exigencies, individual preju-
dices, or local irritability, never offer sufficient reason
for anything so drastic, or so certain to injure work-
ing class interests.

Syndicalists are contradictory, as well as futile.
While they demand freedom for the individual or
for the group to strike, without reference to the
general interest, and declaim against central control,
they insistently preach the general strike. No man
experienced in industrial conditions would like to
insist that under all circumstances the general strike
was anathema. Occasions may arise when a com-
plete stoppage offers the only means of righting
great wrongs, or of avoiding great evils. But even
in great crises, a general strike ought only to be
undertaken after all other methods have failed, after
all facts have been ascertained, all interests consulted
and unified, and all chances and consequences care-
fully calculated. To suggest that action modifying
the trend and operation of economic factors, vio-
lently disturbing the normal expectations of industry,
and involving millions in immediate unemployment
should be undertaken with the rapidity which is
typified by the word lightning, and dependent upon
the will of a single individual or of a group like the
Council of Action, is monstrous and foreign to every
principle of business and democracy.

The strike weapon has always been in the hands
of the trade unionist and has been regarded as a
legitimate weapon. The syndicalist strike is, how-
ever, outside and beyond ordinary trade union prin-

162 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

ciples. The difference between the two affects both
conception and objective. Strikes entered upon by
trade unionists acting as such, presuppose the ulti-
mate resumption of work in the industry, and under
the existing conditions of manufacture and trading.
At the back of every syndicalist strike there lies the
determination to change the foundation upon which
business is based, and to substitute occupational for
individual incentives. Under syndicalism, the unions
would own everything belonging to their own trades,
including the trade unionists. The latter would own
nothing beyond the privilege of working for the
union and the possibility of sharing whatever results
accrued from its bargains with other unions. Since
the trade unions exist to protect the workers' trade
interests, it logically follows that all attempts to
overthrow the industrial system upon which trade
and trade unionism is based, are alien and inimical.
Strikes become alien to trade unionism when they
divorce wages questions from considerations of mar-
ket power, i. e. the power to pay wages, which comes
from the power to sell produce ; when they discount
the possibility of the resumption of work by en-
couraging the burning of factories, or the flooding
of mines, or other forms of material damage; when
they manifest no conception of, or provision for,
the general rights of workers who are not syndi-
calists. The destruction of a basic industry like that
of coal offers an example of what is meant, for this
must carry with it the destruction of dependent
industries such as steel, iron, tinplates, and the other

SYNDICALISM 163

mechanically powered occupations upon which mil-
lions of British workers depend for bread.

Labour, at least in Britain, is not yet sufficiently
organised to warrant optimistic conclusions concern-
ing even the possibility, let alone the results, of a
general strike precipitated by syndicalists. Even if
the contrary in respect of organisation was true, if
every man and every woman eligible to join the trade
union movement took up membership, if all units
were brought together and brigaded, if financial
resources were sufficient and accessible, if all jeal-
ousies were overcome and central direction accepted,
then, paradoxical as it may seem, everything obtain-
able through syndicalism and the general strike could
be independently obtained. Success in industrial
movements may be achieved, but success is for the
army with captains, and not for the leaderless mob,
and lasting success is achieved only after thoughtful
and continuous preparation and effort and apprecia-
tion of the real capacity of the forces it is proposed
to embroil.

The trade union movement ought to interrogate
the syndicalists whose folly and criminality are
bringing Britain to the edge of that slope which
leads to industrial and political destruction. It
ought to know the position of the syndicalists and
the destination towards which they really travel.
Promises and programmes ought no longer to suf-
fice. The trade union movement ought to know
whether it is fighting for the economic advancement
of its units ; whether it is resisting attacks upon rights

164. WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

and principles, or whether it is being used and
abused by irresponsible revolutionaries of the middle
class; whether its future will be based upon a system
which, imperfect though it is, offers opportunities,
incentives and elasticity, or whether it will experi-
ment with a system which actually begins by locking
occupations in separate departments and claiming
for each department primary and exclusive owner-
ship of all it handles or produces.

CHAPTER XIV
COMMUNISM IN RUSSIA AND BRITAIN

THE Communist, whether he resides in Moscow
or Glasgow, seldom sees beyond the little
circle of his friends and sympathisers. What ap-
pears to be possible to the minds within the sphere
of his personal association, appears to be possible in
every country and amongst every type of people.
He never realises that theory and practice are two
different things; nor does he realise that theory,
which might be applied in some parts of the world
with comparative success, would only result in tragic
catastrophe were it put into operation somewhere
else.

Moscow is to-day the Mecca of the Communist.
Always he turns his eyes towards this political holy
of holies, and always reverently accepts the crude
"obiter dicta" of the cruel and ill-formed autocrats
who to-day dominate Russia.

Perhaps Russia offered the best testing ground in
the world for renewed experiments in Communism.
Ninety per cent, of the people lived upon the land,
and even before the war they were more or less
self-contained and self-supporting. Unhappily, they
were also mainly illiterate, and, being temperamen-
tally prone to adopt flamboyant ideas, they were

165

166 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

easily influenced by Communist propaganda, which
here possessed a better chance of achieving success
than in any other nation.

Behind the fact that they were almost equally
independent of import and export trade, there lay
the political incentive of centuries of autocratic and
scandalous government. The people were indeed
ripe for change, yet in spite of all the territorial
and economic and political advantages which the
Russian Communists had, their efforts have resulted
in widespread misery, in death, and in gigantic politi-
cal failure.

Not long ago, I discussed the situation with an
Englishman whose life had been spent in Russia in
the conduct of a business founded there by his grand-
father. When the original revolution took place,
the factories were in excellent working order; the
people were reasonably treated, and out of their
earnings managed to maintain an existence in decency
and comparative comfort. To-day, after four years'
control by the Communists, the factories that were
prosperous are falling to pieces and the machinery
is rotting with rust. A business which has taken
three generations of individual effort to build up has
been destroyed by the Communists in three years.

This is a very serious matter for Russia, but, being
agricultural rather than industrial, her people can,
with some facility, turn their hands to occupations
which will at least bring them bread. In Britain,
the similar destruction of industry would have far
more serious consequences. Even if the people were

COMMUNISM 167

able to turn themselves to the land, the land is not
there in sufficient quantities. They must, therefore,
trade, or emigrate, or die.

In this Elysium of the Communists, there are
millions of secret police, public and private inform-
ers, functionaries and State officials, who have to
be paid or supported by the men who work on the
land or in the factories. The peasant does not sell
his produce ; it is taken by force, and he is given in
return paper money of such little value that he does
not trouble to count it; he weighs it, and tells you
its value in pounds avoirdupois, instead of pounds
sterling.

The term Communist, as applied to the present
governors of Russia, hardly conveys to British
minds correct impressions of the characters of the
men who have driven that unhappy country through
the revolutionary flames. There is no comparison
between their present and immediately past prac-
tices and the ideal conceptions attributed to them.
Terrorist is the more apposite phrase than Commu-
nist. At once they are the slaves of their own mad
passions and of theorists that are impossible and
untenable. They have arrogated to themselves the
right to govern consequences and to dictate to all
men, even in matters of life and death. They claim
to be the progenitors of the perfect State and advo-
cates of the world's peace, yet they have organised
cosmopolitan armies and used these armies to spread
by force the doctrines of destruction.

Many there are, indeed, who had no desire for

168 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

the perpetuation of the excesses which have horri-
fied the world. They would have stopped short of
the grosser outrages, if not from motives of human-
ity, at least from motives of policy. They made,
however, the mistake that all revolutionaries make ;
they forgot that it is easier to create a terrestrial
hell than it is to limit its area or to control its activi-
ties. Murder and rapine did, in fact, become too
ghastly for the Slav, and his terrorist directors were
therefore constrained to employ the blackguards
from other countries.

Russia herself offers too limited a field for the
activities of her particular brand of Communist, and
many of them have avowed their intention to spread
their terror over all the earth.

The theory of Communism is not new. It has
been enunciated many times, and under many cir-
cumstances, and always it has been found wanting.
It fails as all similar "isms" fail because it proceeds
on the assumption that all men are equal, and that
all will give of their best without thought of par-
ticular reward. It fails because it refuses to recog-
nise that what is possible in the infancy of nations is
impossible when their adolescent period has been
passed. It fails because a theory and its application
has never been the same where men were the solvent.

It may sound nice to say from the platform that
one is happy in being called a Communist. It would
be equally wise to say that one was happy in never
having read history, in being ignorant of economics,
and in denying the existence of human fallibility.

COMMUNISM 169

Recently I met three distinguished Russians. All
of them were Socialists, and all of them were co-
operators. One had been concerned with the first
revolution. Of that I am certain. Perhaps the
other two were also concerned, because both were
heads of the Zemstvo of the districts in which they
resided, and it is notorious that the Zemstvo first
made the Russian revolution possible. They came
to this country to plead for consideration, not as
politicians understanding the intricacies of interna-
tional politics, but as representative workers who
were in danger of having their throats cut if the
extremists in the British Labour movement were
enabled to continue their support of the Bolsheviki.
Each one told the story of his district, of the sup-
pression of every democratic right, of the exacting
and exploitation, and of the deportation of their
food and their young women.

One of them, a quiet, gentlemanly fellow, with
the blue eyes and the flaxen hair of the Scandinavian,
said that, having finished his mission in this country,
having endeavoured to explain to Englishmen the
real facts of the situation, he would return, knowing
that on his return the only thing open to him would
be to take a rifle and defend himself and his wife
and his children until death made defence no longer
possible or necessary.

It was necessary to explain to these men that the
bulk of Britishers were neither cowards nor men
to whom the practice of dishonouring their obliga-
tions was usual; that a minority, for political rea-

170 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

sons, and without understanding, had misrepresented
the Briton. They were informed that financial rea-
sons and the vastness of Russia had forced the
Government into pursuing courses which were for-
eign to the temperament of the majority of the peo-
ple in Britain. They found it difficult to believe this.
The only thing they could think of was the insecurity
of life and property, and the horrors heaped upon
their people by men who were just as anxious to
destroy democracy as they were anxious to destroy
capital.

In this country we have apostles of Communism
who are temperamentally just as narrow and bigoted
as Lenin. They do not possess his ability, but they
possess a terrible capacity for diverting the Govern-
ment from fixed policies. They have imperfectly
defined, but frequently expressed objectives. Revo-
lution is what they preach, but they are not agreed
as to which kind of revolution would suit their sev-
eral ambitions, nor can they realise their inability
to control a revolution and to cut it off at the
moment when, from their point of view, they con-
sider it has been effective; nor do they realise the
difference between irresponsible agitation and re-
sponsible construction. Unhappily for the rest of us,
they were able, in the early days of the war, to
frighten the Government, and they have managed to
keep up this sense of fear even until to-day.

It is fear which has paralysed the Government on
profoundly important occasions. It is this fear
which has led the Government to refuse the gauntlet

COMMUNISM 171

thrown into the arena by men who wish to precipi-
tate anarchy. It is this fear which has created a
situation difficult for the Government, or for any
Government, to control, even if it were much
stronger than the one which at the moment presides
over the destinies of the British Commonwealth.

Most of us are praying that the Government will
either overcome its fears or resign its position.
Anything, especially in the affairs of a nation, is
better than indefiniteness and indecision. Oscillation
is no substitute for inspiration.

There is, of course, an assumption in Britain that
the Britisher would never descend to the beastliness
and the brutality which has characterised the vary-
ing phases of the Lenin dictatorship. Those who
hold this view have no grounds of complaint if
others doubt the wisdom of their conclusions after
reading the reports of the revolutionary outbreaks
in Boston, Massachusetts. Boston rightly claims to
be amongst the most cultured and intelligent of
American cities. Its standard of municipal patriot-
ism and social purity impresses the Englishman who
visits the city, and yet, within a few hours of the
commencement of its police strike, millions of dollars
worth of property had been looted, and women and
girls were being molested in the streets. Our own
experiences in Liverpool prevent the development
of any sense of smug superiority. Our crowds were
as bad as the Boston crowds, and would have been
worse had it not been for the fear that the presence
of troops engendered.

172 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Civilisation is a long time effecting radical changes
in the hearts of men. It places a polish upon their
utterances and their actions, but it leaves them only
a little removed from those races which are said to
be uncivilised. Once the veneer is dissolved, and
the polish disturbed, elemental instincts dominate.
So we, unless a new spirit arises amongst the people
and in the Government, may find ourselves guilty of
crimes and outrages similar to those which have dis-
graced the cause of Labour in Russia.

Britain, indeed, has nothing to hope for from any
form of Communism or revolution. By sacrificing
her genius for evolutionary politics she gains nothing
and loses everything.

Following a bad example is foolish at any time,
but when the badness is obvious, and the leaders are
decamping or recanting, it is truly idiotic. For some
time the speeches of Lenin have indicated doubt.
To-day, his writ no longer runs throughout Russia.
Government by terror implies the possession of suffi-
cient instruments. The Soviet Government no
longer has the necessary men or the revolvers to
overawe the real Russia. It has sought and is seek-
ing association with the capitalists it derided. It
may be clever enough to change its coat in time, but
it will have to hurry, for the new Russia which is
emerging from the tribulation of the past seven
years knows how futile Communism is, and how
horribly its exponents have scarified her moral, social
and intellectual life.

It will be interesting and instructive to watch the

COMMUNISM 173

re-association of the scattered fragments of Russian
life and policy. The new progress promises to be
evolutionary rather than revolutionary. For all the
affairs of life — self-protection, self-education, main-
tenance, transport, and development — first individu-
als, then hamlets, then villages will associate and
federate. Then larger and larger groups will
coalesce until once more Russia will stand regenerate
before the world.

While all this gathering together of orderly forces
is taking place in the home of the Slav, the Briton
is being harried and bullied into situations which
must involve him in tragedy more terrible than that
enacted in Russia. He is being urged to sacrifice
country to Communism; to take up the dice the
Russian is discarding, and to put to the hazard his
own and his children's inheritance. Is he fool
enough to do it?

Not if he remembers that Communism has neither
the backing of history, the force of logic, nor the
prestige which comes from successful achievement.

CHAPTER XV
CO-PARTNERSHIP

ANOTHER question which must be considered
by organised Labour during the next few
years is that of productive method; whether this
shall continue on purely individualistic lines or
whether Labour will accept some form of co-part-
nership.

Personally, I approach the question of co-part-
nership in the spirit of an inquirer who at present
is without definite conviction; who does not know
whether to regard co-partnership as an interesting
cult or as a practicable solution of industrial diffi-
culties. The tenor of what I write must, therefore,
be interrogative rather than dogmatic. It will,
indeed, be gratifying to succeed even to the extent
of clearing my own mental conceptions of the
subject.

Years ago, an old student colleague advised me,
when in doubt, to apply to myself, or to my subject,
what he called the Socratic method. As far as I
have been able to understand the Socratic method,
it consists in asking questions, mostly inconvenient,
sometimes impertinent, but often exceedingly useful.

Recently, I have been asking myself and other
people many questions concerning the present state

174

CO-PARTNERSHIP 175

of things, and the possibility of co-partnership meet-
ing the situation.

It would be easy to write extolling the ideals of
co-partnership; to paint word-pictures of a world
from which selfishness and ignorance had been elimi-
nated, and in which social altruism and contentment
reigned. It would be easy to do this, and very fool-
ish to do it if such a line of thought minimised the
importance of securing satisfactory answers to the
questions which so many are asking.

Why are we to-day discussing seriously and more
generally than before, departures from the existing
order of things? Has the system of training, prac-
tised through so many centuries, ceased to meet our
requirements? Is it the system that has failed, or
the human operators of the system?

The immediate and popular answer to such a
question would undoubtedly be that the system has
failed, or is failing, to meet present-day develop-
ments. On every hand, one finds men and women
of widely differing types, different attainments, and
different social standing, condemning the system and
demanding the substitution of some other method
of dealing with production and of remunerating and
of creating an interest in Labour. That most people
are adopting this attitude as a matter of fashion,
rather than of reasoned conviction, does not alter
the fact; nor does it remove the necessity for fairly
and squarely facing the pros and cons of alternative
schemes.

The campaign for nationalisation has, for the time

176 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

being, failed; not because its advocates were idle
or inarticulate, but because of the almost universal
revulsion against the costs and restraints of govern-
ment by bureaucracy. Profit-sharing has had partial
successes; but it fails to meet the modern demand
for participation in control. Will co-partnership
meet the situation? If we secure its general intro-
duction, are we to regard it as an amelioration or as
a panacea? Will.it patch up, or will it solve all our
industrial problems? What do we really mean by
co-partnership, and what industrial areas do we
expect it to cover?

Definitions are said to be the most dangerous
things that man can attempt. Having neither
prejudices against, nor violent predilections in
favour, I might be permitted to say that co-partner-
ship involves an association of all the factors essen-
tial to production, and implies the intention of co-
partners to share the advantages, the disadvantages,
and the responsibility of any business adventure.

It is, perhaps, necessary to explain that simple
profit-sharing involves neither the sharing of losses
nor the sharing of control. It is also necessary, in
order to avoid future disillusionment, to explain
that co-partnership is not a substitute for work.
Whether we continue under the existing system, or
adopt co-partnership, or accept nationalisation, we
shall still eat bread by the sweat of our brow. If
co-partnership involves association of the factors
necessary to production, it is important that we
should determine, in our own minds, what these

CO-PARTNERSHIP 177

factors are, and to what extent it is possible to bring
about a working coalition.

It is obvious that, in the broadest sense, Capital
and Labour supply all that is essential. I put Capital
first, not out of any disrespect to Labour, but be-
cause I regard Capital as wealth which is both
indigenous and accumulated; something, in fact,
which nature provides or man saves. The part that
nature provides is there (though not all of us always
acknowledge the fact), before man either acts or
saves. Quite apart, then, from alphabetical order
or euphony, it is permissible to put Capital first,
because it is nature's way.

Mankind ought really to have no quarrel with
Capital. Without it, the world would be a sorry
place for its existing populations. Capital is not
merely the stock of money held by individuals to
carry on the world's business. Money is only the
liquid — and, under existing rates of taxation, the
diminishing — part of Capital. Capital is really
everything non-human which enters into the scheme
of production in the effort to maintain existence. It
is natural resources, as well as factories, machines,
railways, mines, and ships. Labour itself is at once
potential and highly perishable capital.

The looseness with which the term Labour is used
is responsible for much of the misconception and
unrest that exists. On the platform and in the
Press, the term is usually applied exclusively to
manual labour. The definition I recently prepared
for the compilers of the Annals of the American

178 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

Academy of Political and Social Science, expresses
my own conception : —

"Labour is that inventive, initiative, construc-
tive, and manipulative capacity which, applied to
materials, conditions and requirements, extracts
and makes and distributes those things which are
essential to human existence, enlightenment and
happiness."

Such a definition may be imperfect, but it takes
cognisance of the inventive labour of a Watts or an
Edison, and the efforts of those who conceive busi-
ness, provide capital, organise manipulative and
technical personnel, and exploit markets. It recog-
nises manual labour, both skilled and unskilled,
whether it is employed in fashioning materials or
in distributing them. It does not ignore the possi-
bility of extending credit to that political effort
which keeps open, or should keep open, international
highways and opportunities.

This conception of Labour immediately challenges
many popularly accepted theories. It also invites
comparisons as to values and remunerations. Should
each factor in the scheme of production be treated
equally? If there is differentiation in whose favour
should it operate? Should the inventor, the capi-
talist, the organiser, or the manual worker have
preference? Each will answer these questions ac-
cording to his understanding and his circumstances.
To me, it seems just that the manual worker should
be favourably placed; that his share of the profits

CO-PARTNERSHIP 179

of industry should be generous and assured, and that
his social obligations to his family and his fellows
should be recognised when the share is determined.

There is one eternal and immutable stipulation.
He must produce value in return for the value he
receives. Whether his share is paid in wages or in
goods, is immaterial to this question. He must
replace this share by producing what will balance
his personal account, replace waste, provide reserves,
and maintain the State.

Will it be possible for any scheme of co-partner-
ship that is in existence, or that can be designed,
to bring these material and human factors into a
relationship which is at once more productive and
more harmonious than that which is now in exist-
ence?

I have never accepted the assertion that Capital
and Labour are essentially antagonistic. If it were
possible to get away from the narrow conception
which each has of the other, and bring them more
closely into understanding and relationship, under
a system which permitted them not only to share
profits, but to share losses and responsibilities, the
advantages would be enormous. These advantages
would accrue, not only to the men who own capital
and the men who work materials, but to that more
important entity, the whole community.

For many years, the desire to promote understand-
ing has been exceedingly strong with me, and I have
taken every possible opportunity to bring men and
employers together for the purpose of settling the

differences which constantly arise between them and
for the further purpose of discussing those methods
of production which appear to press upon the com-
fort and health of the worker, or appear to him to
be wasteful and unnecessary. Usually, these con-
ferences have benefited the employer much more
than they have benefited the men. He has discov-
ered intelligence, and frequently interest in the busi-
ness, and he has been able to make profits out of his
discoveries.

If any arrangement could be reached which
enabled the workman also to secure additional profit
through his intelligence and his interest in the busi-
ness, such an arrangement ought obviously to make
for less waste and increase of production.

With me, however, the greatest difficulty has
always been in determining where these forms of
co-partnership could begin. Up to the present, the
workman is mainly concerned with wages, hours
and working conditions. Only in rare instances do
his thoughts travel backwards to the inception of
the business, the provision of capital, the erection
of premises, the provision of machinery, the gather-
ing together of personnel or the discovery and re-
tention of markets. Nor does he often think of the
need for extension, for changes, not only in methods
of production, but in the character of the articles
produced. Nor would he always agree with his
employer as to the amount of profits to be set aside
each year in order to provide adequate reserves.
In the nature of things, he lives largely in the pres-

CO-PARTNERSHIP 181

ent ; and, this being the case, it seems inevitable that
the area of co-partnership schemes shall be, for the
present, limited to what may be termed the manipu-
lative side of industry; expansion coming after
experience and confidence have been gained.

If I am asked whether I think an association of
employers and workmen on these limited lines
desirable, I unhesitatingly say, "Yes." Whether the
adventure, as such, succeeded or failed it would have
educative results; and workmen, at least, would
learn from experience which of the systems best
suited their own conditions. In this sense, I believe
that experiments are essential.

The temperament of the Britisher inclines him
to look to experience rather than to reasoning; and,
once involved in the difficulties and anxieties of
management, he must become a better-balanced indi-
vidual.

There are many difficulties ahead of co-partner-
ship schemes. Quite apart from the human, and
common, disinclination to accept responsibility, there
is the distinct opposition of the Socialists, who
believe that co-partnership is palliation, and that it
postpones the introduction of the political millen-
nium. There is also the definite opposition of the
Trade Unionist, who believes that as the interests
of the worker in the business are strengthened, his
interests in the Trade Union are weakened.

With the objection of the Socialists I am not
concerned; but, naturally, I do sympathise with the
point of view of the Trade Union official, who sees

182 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

in the general adoption of co-partnership, the gen-
eral disintegration of the movement he and his
prototypes have built up. I sympathise with his
fears, but do not think they should stand in the way
of any change which advances the common good.
Trade Unionism, like any other institution, must
face the test of utility. It has been an important
factor in the affairs of men for more than 200 years.
Even when it was incipient, it was important. It has
done more than any other force to advance the
interests of men who work for wages. Its successes
cannot be measured by the direct results in England
and America. The effect of its activities has been
felt, and its influence has improved conditions, even
in countries where no actual Trade Union organisa-
tion exists. It has achieved many things, but it may
not have achieved permanence. It is possible that,
in the changes that are inevitable, it will be affected
or even superseded.

It is always good for institutions, as well as for
men, to remember that the world existed without
them, and may continue to exist even though they
pass away. It would be foolish, therefore, for the
officials of the Trade Union movement to oppose
the introduction of co-partnership. It would be part
of their duty to overlook all efforts in this direction,
and to see that they produced results at least as
beneficial to the workers as the old system produces.
If they look at the position broadly, they will cease
opposition to anything which promises improvement.
If they look at the movement for co-partnership

CO-PARTNERSHIP 183

wisely, they will seek to control it rather than to
destroy it.

There is the equally important opposition of
capital. It will say, and say rightly, that at present,
and for a long time to come, it will be quite impos-
sible for the partnership to be complete ; that labour,
in the nature of things, cannot come in at the begin-
ning; that the scheme of the business must inevitably
be formed before the manual workers are even
gathered together. They will fear the workman's
interference in plans that he does not understand,
and they will grudge the time required to explain
why certain things were done and why certain things
must be done if the business is to succeed. They
will point, not to the few successes that co-partner-
ship has achieved, but to the many failures that are
recorded; and they will tell you that one of the
essential factors in the successful management of a
business is rapidity of decision and action, and that
these are impossible if too many interests are to be
considered and conciliated before action is taken.

There is also the workmen's objection to co-
partnership. I have seen offers of it rejected without
examination, and I doubt whether the great ma-
jority of the workers have ever given it serious
consideration at all, or really desire to be troubled
about it.

In spite of objections and apathy, there does not
appear, at the moment, any alternative to the pres-
ent system which offers so much promise as co-
partnership, dealing, as it could, with individual

184 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

businesses involving equal responsibilities, and
arranging, in joint conference, terms between those
who provide and create and those who manipulate
and distribute.

Some day it may be possible to pass from the
individual business and operate the industry on
similar lines, but that is a problem of co-operation
for another generation.

CHAPTER XVI

TRADE AND TAXES

TO-DAY, manufacturers find themselves with
depleted resources, with closed or reluctant
markets, and with stocks that have been accumulated
while costs of production have been abnormally
high. Behind these stocks are debts to the banks;
and the fact that stocks must, in large proportions,
be disposed of in markets over which the merchants
have no effective control, that is, control which
enables them to force prices higher than the prices
of competitors, or in excess of the buyers' concep-
tions of economic value. Manufacturers are being
urged, particularly by people who only manufacture
words and programmes, to cut their losses; that is,
of course, to forgo their estimated profits, and per-
haps to entrench upon their reserves by selling goods
at less than the cost of the raw material used, plus
the wages of production. They may do this as a
matter of policy, or at the dread command of the
Official Receiver, but in either case, the aggregate
standard of commercial stability will be injured and
the common standards of comfort will be threatened.
Whatever the manufacturer may think of the
advice to sell, regardless of productive cost, he can-
not escape the problems of how to get rid of stocks;

185

186 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

how to repay loans guaranteed by stocks that have
lost value; how to replace stocks at lower produc-
tive cost ; how to ensure effective distribution of new
stocks after these have been manufactured.

The first two problems are closely related. Upon
success in selling stocks depends ability to repay
loans. The manufacturer who sells in a falling mar-
ket must, of necessity, weaken the sum total of his
credit, and so handicap his future operations. The
community cannot afford to regard the failure of any
manufacturer as an unimportant matter, and as
manufacturers are being asked to help the people by
providing employment, the manufacturer is, in re-
turn, entitled to ask the people to help him by pro-
viding reserves of credit, and, wherever possible, by
reducing the enormous burden of taxation.

It is necessary to speak with the greatest diffi-
dence of all credit schemes. The subject is difficult
and complex, and its ramifications extend far beyond
the confines of Britain. It is governed by factors
that the average man seldom considers or under-
stands. Perhaps the only people who treat credit
lightly are those who never had any.

Any national credit scheme, to be successful,
should be financed by the people, guaranteed by the
State, and administered by business experts. There
is every justification for demanding that credit to
overseas markets should be in the shape of goods
manufactured in Britain. Advancing cash to the
Governments of impecunious States will encourage
extravagance rather than trade. Governments of

TRADE AND TAXES 187

countries receiving material credits must be asked
to guarantee repayment, and to facilitate the collec-
tion of sums owing. Credit Bonds might be issued
to the public in similar fashion to the issue of War
Savings Certificates, and they could be redeemed
gradually as overseas debts are paid and commercial
situations improve.

Apart from getting rid of existing stocks, is the
need for replacing them at lower productive costs.
The main costing factors are raw materials, labour,
profit, rates of interest, mechanical power, transport,
rates and taxes.

Imported raw materials are already coming in at
lower prices. Cotton is a startling example. Labour
will certainly become cheaper, if not in terms of
nominal wages, at least in terms of greater efficiency.
The amount given to labour is of less importance
than the return given by labour. It matters little
what labour receives, provided labour returns, not
merely value, but that surplus necessary to develop
the business, maintain the State, and provide for con-
tingencies. Labour, whether of hand or brain,
whether directive or manipulative, must earn its corn
or starve.

Profits, not only on goods in stock, but on goods
to be manufactured, must be smaller than the past
five years' experiences have led men to expect.
Speaking generally, it is safe to say that stocks de-
teriorate by holding, if not intrinsically, at least in
the sense that interest is paid or lost on the capital

188 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

locked up in stock; consequently, holding on for
profit may result in actual and grave losses.

The tendency to-day is for men to expect com-
petences after a very few years of work and effort.
They will have to modify their expectations. A
hundred years ago my great-grandfather made bricks
by hand and sold these bricks at 22/- per thousand.
It is said that manufacturers to-day expect a similar
sum as profit! Reductions in profit must precede
reductions in wages. It will be useless to ask the
workmen to accept lower wages if manufacturers
continue their attempts to exact war-time profits.

The importance of internally derived and ex-
ploited mechanical power has been forced upon the
business community by the war and post-war attitude
of the miners. For two hundred years coal has been
the main source of the power behind British indus-
try, and the price and availability of coal is a mat-
ter of grave concern to everyone connected with
trade and commerce. It takes three tons of coal,
or coal product, to make one ton of tin plate, while
£i per ton off coal means £4 per ton off steel. There
is no secret about the American and Belgian and
German capacity for underselling Britain in these
and similar products. They have cheaper coal and
more effective labour.

Transport, particularly for a nation which must
sell overseas, affects all selling prices. Freightage
of wood went up 775 per cent.; railways, in 1913,
received an income of £135,000,000. In 1919 their
income had risen to £318,000,000, and as there was

TRADE AND TAXES 189

a deficit of £36,000,000 which the State has guaran-
teed, railways have taken a grand, if not a glorious,
total of £354,000,000 out of the British traveller
and trader, or £219,000,000 in excess of what they
took in 1913. It would be interesting for those who
are accountants or experts at figures to work out the
percentage which this gigantic sum adds to the dis-
tributive costs of British commerce, and the extent
to which it affects unemployment.

Before the war we had one great trade competi-
tor. Germany went to war for markets rather
than for the Hohenzollerns. To-day, two other
competitors have entered the industrial and com-
mercial struggle. America and Japan have been
our Allies. In commercial and industrial rivalry
they are as much against us as Germany. Whatever
may be our expectations, we shall, in fact, receive
no quarter. America has already indicated her inten-
tions. She promises to play fairly, but she will play
hardly, and in her own interests.

What has the Council of Action to say to these
three capable and forceful rivals? Will they be told
to abolish overtime, to restrict peremptorily the
working hours to eight per day, and to restrict also
the output of those who remain at work?

Nothing of the kind. The Council of Action, and
the others, will reiterate frequently exploded plati-
tudes and rejoice anew over the passing of vain
resolutions.

War, and post-war taxation, has also handicapped
industry and closed down factories. In considering

190 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

taxation, it is desirable to include both the Imperial
and local forms. It is necessary, also, to consider
the purpose for which taxation is imposed. It is
usually :

(a) To provide the income necessary to meet
national and local charges;

(b) To prevent the importation of goods
which interfere with home industries;

(c) To lessen the consumption of the less
essential commodities.

The statesman has to consider, also, whether all
taxation imposed is necessary; whether its incidence
is wisely distributed, and whether it limits enter-
prise. The latter consideration is most important
to those who are dealing with employment.

In studying the effect of taxation on the business
of a country, and through business, or lack of it, on
unemployment, it is necessary to ask :

(a) Has taxation reached the pitch at which
it limits enterprise?

(b) Has capital been handicapped to the
extent of forcing it to seek non-speculative invest-
ment— i.e. Government Loans — which are non-
productive as well as non-speculative?

(c) Has the Government, by absorbing liquid
capital and placing it at the disposal of its own
spending Departments, limited the amount avail-
able for trade and wages, and so created unem-
ployment and loss of productive capacity?

(d) Has it, by excessive taxation, limited the
liquid capital on the money market, and, to the

TRADE AND TAXES 191

extent of this limitation, increased rates of inter-
est and the export prices of commodities?

Whatever the Government may say, the man in
the street will answer all the foregoing questions in
the affirmative.

Taxation in Mr. Gladstone's time was £100,000,-
ooo per annum; the estimated expenditure for
national purposes in 1920-21, exclusive of rates,
was the astounding sum of £1,418,300,000. To this
terrifying total must now be added local rates vary-
ing from io/- to 2y/- in the pound.

It may be asserted that, in face of the unavoid-
able expenditure forced upon the country by the war,
the whole of this taxation becomes necessary. It is,
however, permissible to doubt the assertion, and to
argue that less waste during the war, and a more
effective cutting down after the war, of Departments
that have no use in peace time, would have rendered
much of the taxation unnecessary.

Money was literally thrown away on enterprises
that were extravagantly designed, and constructed
on a system of payments that invited dishonesty.
To pay contractors a percentage on what they spent
was to invite extravagant spending. Henrowe and
Chepstow, as well as Slough, offer outstanding
examples. It is alleged that every brick in the for-
mer place cost a shilling to lay; while at Chepstow,
one of the men who knew something about ships,
and who had for years been building ships in the
locality, complained pitifully of being made subor-

192 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

dinate to official shipbuilders who "wore brass hats
and spurs."

The country has suffered, is suffering, and will
suffer, because of the unhappy passion for creating
new Departments to meet each emergency. That
this passion did not immediately abate after the war,
was shown by the creation of a Ministry of Mines,
and the appointment, in connection with the Minis-
try, of 397 new officials. That for five years
Departments of doubtful utility overlapped or trod
on each other's heels, counts for little in the eyes
of the Minister who desires to accomplish great
things and leave a great name as a Departmental
Chief. The effect upon the pockets of the commu-
nity of these Departments, stated in terms of cash,
was shown by the 1 920-2 1 demand for £497,3 1 8,000
for Civil Services.

The people of Britain, and the trade of Britain,
will have to pay these charges, and the people will
be justified in deciding that not another penny of
new taxation shall be imposed, but that existing
expenses shall be curtailed, and all other projects
which involve the spending of money shall be post-
poned.

Whatever the sum total of taxes, the people have
to consider the fairness or unfairness with which
they are imposed. As all classes in democracy
share the responsibility and the burdens of expendi-
ture, it is unfair for any class to escape its due pro-
portion, or to receive from taxes what it ought to
earn by work.

TRADE AND TAXES 193

There has been an impression that the raising of
the Income Tax exemption limit from £i 60 to £225
has benefited the manual worker and the people
who receive comparatively small salaries. It is,
however, very doubtful whether this impression is
justified. What the workers have escaped in direct
taxation, they are being compelled to pay in indirect
taxation, and to suffer through the dissipation of
liquid surplus and the discouragement of creative
initiative. The evil effect on productivity is aggra-
vated rather than minimised by the attempt to place
all obvious taxation upon the rich or potentially
rich.

Excessive taxation, even when it appears to be
borne by the rich, does most injuriously affect the
poor, because it prevents or retards the accumula-
tion of that surplus which is needed for industrial
maintenance and expansion. Unless such surplus is
accumulated, there must be business reaction and
stagnation. While this may be postponed by bor-
rowing at high rates of interest, it cannot be defi-
nitely avoided. A business, too, which has main-
tained existence for any appreciable period on capital
borrowed at high rates of interest may take a long
time to effect tangible recuperation, and may be
expected to provide, during its period of recupera-
tion, small dividends and low wages. The difficulty
of providing requisite surplus is greater to-day than
before the war, because, owing to the rise in prices
of materials and in wages, much more capital is

WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

needed to work a business than was formerly the
case.

The cost of everything we eat, or drink, or use,
or wear, is increased by excessive taxation, and this
increase affects every commodity, taxed or otherwise.
The result of this is decreased national spending
power, which throws out of work men who provide
for the home market, and decreased power to export
at competitive prices, which prevents that outside
expansion which alone can provide steady and remu-
nerative employment for all our population.

Taxes, it should always be remembered, are cash
transactions. It is not permissible to meet them by
Bills of Exchange drawn at twelve months; nor is
it permissible to postpone payment for any length of
time. Business, in the main, is a credit affair; and
the business man who has to meet heavy taxation,
and particularly unexpected taxation, must budget
for considerably more than the tax-collector de-
mands. If he only adds to the price of his commodi-
ties the exact amount of the tax, he will certainly find
that he has not enough to meet the demands made
upon him. If he has to pay 20 per cent, taxes, he
will, in all probability, put 40 per cent, on his prices,
to be sure of raising the cash, and of indemnifying
himself against the possible losses of credit trade.

New developments in trade are restricted when
the Government absorbs too much in taxes. Britain
depends for her existence mainly on overseas trade.
This is a fact that cannot be too often reiterated,
even though one becomes weary of the process. The

TRADE AND TAXES 195

business man will only face the risks of overseas
enterprise if he sees the possibility of successful com-
petition with other nations at a reasonable profit.

The attempt to accomplish, in a decade, the social
and political ambitions of a century, would have been
costly had the circumstances been favourable, and
had every man placed in office and authority been a
perfect instrument.

Unfortunately, the circumstances were not favour-
able to a successful exploitation of the theories
advanced, and ill-considered and unco-ordinated
interferences have further denuded the war-im-
poverished resources of Britain.

The average man does not believe that this is
so. His impression that there is still plenty of money
in the country is, unhappily, encouraged by the
criminally foolish utterances of those who profess
to lead.

At one of the industrial conferences, such a leader
(and a very well-known one) declared that they
wanted a good "Friday night," whether they worked
or whether they played. He emphasised his de-
mands by saying that before the war, the banks had
in reserve thirteen thousand millions, while now they
held seventeen thousand millions.

"The worker wants some of this increased
wealth," he cried, and he quite failed to appreciate
the incongruity of his utterances when, later in the
same speech, he was assuring his audience that the
sovereign was now only worth seven shilling and six-
pence !

196 WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE WE ARE

That the nation is short of liquid capital is proved
by some recent failures, in which the assets greatly
exceeded the liabilities of the concerns affected. But
the assets were bricks and mortar, and machinery
and goodwill, and these could not be used to buy
raw materials, or to pay the wages of labour.

It is often argued that the banks are emphasising
the shortage of liquid capital by their refusal to
advance money for speculative purposes. It should
never be forgotten, however, that the banks are cus-
todians of other people's money, and are not sup-
posed to enter into speculative enterprises unless
the security offered amply safeguards the interests
of the people whose money they hold. That the
banks are justified in exercising care is demonstrated
by the recent unhappy occurrences in connection with
Farrow's Bank.

Those who are almost daily advocating inoppor-
tune, and sometimes ill-considered, legislation, and
who only see social salvation in the imposition of
levies on already dangerously depleted capitals, sel-
dom seem to realise how much their advocacy dam-
ages trading possibilities, and develops the circum-
stances which make for unemployment. This advo-
cacy of theirs goes counter to the real desires of
those on whose behalf they claim to speak. What
the genuinely unemployed workers of Britain need
is not a Government which satisfies, or attempts to
satisfy, the demands of the unthinking by borrowing,
or wasting the national substance in bureaucratic
experiments; they need a Government which will

TRADE AND TAXES 197

keep its expenditure well within the capacity of its
people, and which will have the courage to cut out
things, however desirable in themselves, if these can-
not be paid for without increasing the handicap of
trade.

THE END

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